Ethereum Developers Successfully Test the Shadow Fork for Upcoming Upgrade ‘The Merge’

On Monday, April 11, Ethereum developers successfully launched the the mainnet shadow for, a stress test for its upcoming software The Merge. This is yet another major developmental step of moving towards the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum network.

Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden called its a “huge success” adding that the shadow fork deployment had gone smoothly. He further added: “We’re very close to a historical event. We’re testing PoS on #Ethereum. Today will be the first mainnet shadow fork ever.”

However, the team “noticed some seemingly minor issues” with different implementation nodes on the Ethereum network that it seeks to optimise over the next few weeks.

Shadow fork refers to copying the data from the Ethereum blockchain mainnet to the testnet wherein developers can test features before deploying it on the main network. This is basically a test environment for Ethereum engineers which closely resembles the mainnet. The Ethereum shadow fork network has so far processed nearly 2 million transactions with an average block time of 13 seconds.

During the last weekend, Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathi said that the team has successfully tested three shadow forks of the Goerli testnet. He tweeted: "We've done 3 shadow forks of Goerli with bugs varying from sync code to request timeouts being found. Goerli-shadow-fork-3 is live for anyone to test with, rated at advanced difficulty to join”.

Last month the Ethereum developer team launched the Kiln testnet which was basically the last merge testnet deploying Ethereum’s execution layer to the “consensus layer” of the Beacon chain.

The goal of the Kiln merge testnet is to allow the community to practice running their nodes, test infrastructure, deploy contracts and much more.

Ethereum developers have been working confidently towards the transition to PoS Ethereum 2.0. However, they haven’t confirmed the timeline for ‘The Merge’. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko has predicted that the successful implementation of The Merge shall happen by July this year. However, it is just a “rough estimation”.

The Ethereum 2.0 blockchain seeks to address the existing scalability issues of the existing Ethereum blockchain network. The Proof-of-Stake Ethereum 2.0 will help to reduce the network congestion issues and facilitate low cost transactions.