Ethereum's Ropsten Proof-of-Stake Test Merge Launched

Photo: @lightclients/Twitter

Ethereum's Ropsten Proof-of-Stake test merge launched. Developers merged Ropsten’s proof-of-work chain with its proof-of-stake beacon chain. The purpose of the testnet merger was to prepare for the Ethereum mainnet merger, which should take place sometime later this year.

In preparation for the Ethereum merge coming later this year, the developers activated the merge on the Ropsten testnet that happened on Wednesday afternoon. Ropsten's proof-of-work chain was merged with its proof-of-stake beacon chain by combining their codes into one. This merge is critical to verifying that client software running Ethereum nodes works without any glitches. The merger involved client software teams including Lighthouse, Lodestar, Prysm, Teku, Besu, Erigon, go-ethereum (geth), and Nethermind.

Ropsten has activated proof-of-stake! pic.twitter.com/TKQ8LSJGt6

— ً (@lightclients) June 8, 2022

The same process should occur later this year with the Ethereum mainnet merger, a date yet to be set. Today's event was the main test for the mainnet merge, during which Ethereum will move from proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake.

“I mean of course, the merge working well for 6 hours isn't evidence of complete success,” said Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, in the livestream earlier today. “There are all of these kinds of longer term issues around MEV and staking centralization and protection against DOS attacks and things that could potentially bite us 3 weeks after the merge instead of 2 minutes during the process.”

Today's test is measured by a metric called terminal total difficulty. The merge is considered activated once this level of block difficulty is reached on the proof-of-work version. The proof-of-work version of Ropsten crossed a pre-set 50 quadrillion measure to protect the merge from any malicious activity by artificially acquiring the hashrate. Before the activation of the merge, node operators had to manually configure their clients to override the Ropsten Terminal Total Difficulty for both the proof-of-stake version and proof-of-stake clients, as explained by The Block’s Vishal Chawla.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter

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