As Ethereum 2.0 is expected to deploy by the end of this year, the community including developers, validators, and others are gearing up for a smooth blockchain operation. In order to calculate the post-merge scenario, Ethereum developers tested a first mainnet shadow fork.
One of the Ethereum validators Parithosh defined the shadow forking before Ethereum 2.0 merge to stress test the community’s assumptions regarding testnet’s sync with mainnet along with state growth.
The testing is a milestone in the ongoing shift from proof-of-work consensus to proof-of-stake consensus.
Also, the community wants to find out how to integrate their expectations and ideas into the existing testnet and mainnet.
As Per the road map narrated by Paritosh,
- For shadow fork, the validators take the configuration of the existing testnet and add merge related fields such as Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) and Merge Fork Block (for peering, forkID changes).
- Inheriting the state of the testnet enables validators to examine the post-merge network and calculate the time to build a block.
- To execute the plan, the community has performed 3 shadow forks on the Goerli (Goerli-shadow-fork-3) testnet. During this, they found bugs in sync code and requested timeouts.
- A similar shadow fork was performed on the mainnet with a similar configuration. This crucial ‘stress test’ can help to optimize the performance before the actual optimization.
In a thread of tweets, Parithosh thanked MariusVanDerWijden, who is one of the Ethereum developers, and suggested the idea of shadow forking. He also recommended projects with the base layer and developing blockchains to incorporate some shadow forking for the better learning of the mainnet.
The shadow fork has already processed 4,339,927 transactions with an average block time of 13.3 seconds as of the time of writing. The outcome of the shadow fork is key to determining the timing of the final merge.
Ethereum 2.0 deployment is already delayed and now the entire Ethereum community strives for its launch ASAP. In December, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin revealed a plan to Lay Out The ETH 2.0 ‘Endgame’ Roadmap.
