Ethereum’s Mainnet Tenth 'Shadow Fork' Goes Live Ahead of September Merge

Image: The Cryptonomist

The tenth “shadow fork” of the Ethereum mainnet is being launched ahead of the September Merge. The developers have focused on testing key releases like those that will be featured in the upcoming Goerli merge, the last testnet hard fork before the real Ethereum Merge.

Ethereum's tenth “shadow fork” went into effect on Tuesday, more than a day earlier than expected, as the network continues to conduct tests ahead of an expected transition from using a power-hungry proof-of-work protocol to proof-of-stake, according to CoinDesk. In preparation, Ethereum goes through a series of tests, or shadow forks, that copy data from the main network (mainnet) to the test environment network (testnet).

The fork occurred at 11:45 UTC when the Terminal Total Complexity (TTD) was overridden at 54,892,065,290,522,348,390,492 in block 15217902. Everything went well and no significant failures were reported. The shadow fork brings the project one step closer to the Ethereum mainnet upgrade due in September. The third and final testnet merger, Goerli, is expected to take place on August 10.

Ethereum DevOps Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi told CoinDesk that this shadow fork will test releases that approximate the releases that will be used in the Goerli merge. He also said that the reason why this happened earlier than expected was a clear change in the hashrate, or computational power, that could have sped up the process.

This will not be the last shadow fork of the main network, and Ethereum will continue to launch shadow forks of the main network until the Merge.

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