Ethereum Foundation Successfully Launches Ethereum 2.0 Multi-Client Medalla Testnet

On Tuesday, August 4, the Ethereum Foundation announced that the “final” and “official” public testament for the Ethereum 2.0 is now live.

Dubbed as Medalla, this is final multi-client testnet before the Phase 0 aka the Beacon Chain of Ethereum 2.0. This testnet will give an early assessment into how Ethereum 2.0 mainnet will behave with multiple clients.

As per the Ethereum Foundation, there will be total five clients at the genesis of the Medal testnet. This include Teku, Prysm, Nimbus, Lodestar and Lighthouse. Medalla is one of the many testiest launched for the ETH 2.0 over the last two years.

However, the special thing about the Medalla multi-client testnet is that it was public. Hence it isn’t centrally coordinated by the validators and allows other validators to participate.

Upon the launch of the Medal testnet on Tuesday, over 20,000 validators joined the network staking around 650,000 ether (ETH) tokens, as per the block explorer Beaconcha.in. While the total validators joining was still less than expected its was 25% more than the “minimum validator deposits (16k+ of them) required to kick off the Medalla testnet”.

Ethereum 2.0 is said to be a significant update to the existing Ethereum blockchain which lacks in terms of scalability and functionality considering its current participants. With the Ethereum 2.0, we will completely move from the existing Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a more decentralized Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model.

Speaking on the launch of Medalla, Ethereum Foundation key developer Danny Ryan wrote: “The launch of Medalla is a huge milestone in the development of eth2 – if Medalla proves stable, mainnet launch is next – and represents years of hardwork by countless engineers, researchers, and community members. We hope you are as excited as we are :).”

Note that the Medalla testnet is not handling any real value in ETH at this point. But the excellent thing is it is still allowing validators to earn staking rewards at this point.

Ethereum users who are willing to run a validator need to follow a certain technical process and ensure that their node remains online constantly. For users who are willing to stake their ETH without running a node should join third-party staking platforms like Rocketpool.

With staking via the pools, there’s no such requirement like minimum amount of ETH or having a noise online. The staking pool will do it on your behalf and you just need to pay a small fee.