Ethereum’s Ninth Shadow Fork Goes Live
- A shadow fork is a smaller test fork compared to the Sepolia hard fork or any other full testnet Merge hard fork.
Ethereum’s shadow fork 9 went live today as the developers continued their tests to ensure a smooth transition of the network to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model. The developers have been performing a series of test forks. They copy data from the main network (mainnet) and simulate it in a test network (testnet) environment.
Ethereum Shadow Fork Close Up
A shadow fork is a smaller test fork compared to the Sepolia hard fork or any other full testnet Merge hard fork. This fork usually focuses on not more than two changes that must occur when the Ethereum merge launches finally.
In this shadow fork 9, the developers’ focus is a test of the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) boost feature.
This feature will determine the earnings yield for the network validators once Ethereum finally becomes a proof-of-stake (pos) network. This shadow fork happened at 00:00 UTC following the override of the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) at 53945568722258575228928.
Since the implementation of this shadow fork some hours ago, there have been no reports of any significant glitch. However, the fork happened earlier than predicted.
Previous expectations were that the fork would occur at 15:00 UTC. However, the fork took place 15 hours earlier than expected at 00:00 UTC.
The explanation for this difference was that the developers’ estimation tool made an error when calculating the time. It is important to state that the code in itself has no errors. One of Ethereum foundation’s DevOps engineers, Parithosh, told our media team that a minor spike in the hash rate caused the fork to go off much earlier than expected.
He also said his TTD estimation tool wasn’t accurate because it has a lot of uncleared old states. Parithosh claims that his tool can catch several blocks and average things out despite being a local tool.
But he also clarified that the TTD going off earlier didn’t create any problems. He added that all the other nodes were ready apart from a few syncing nodes.
Hence, it is good that the network works as planned despite the TTD being hit earlier than planned. Parithosh explained that developers could prevent a similar occurrence on the mainnet by using several TTD estimation techniques.
With the completion of this shadow fork, Ethereum takes another step closer to its mainnet switch scheduled to take place before the end of the year.
The network’s developers plan to implement the Goerli testnet in august. This testnet is the third and final one before the merge.
Eth Price and the Merge
Upon the completion of the merge, Ethereum supply circulation will reduce. Many analysts predict that this supply may decrease by up to three bitcoin halvings.
Besides a reduction in supply circulation, a successful merge will cause more trust in the Ethereum network. Hence, the Ethereum price could soar. Current
Ethereum’s price is $3,044.53, up 7.23 percent over the past 24 hours.
Rebecca is a Senior Staff Writer at BitcoinWisdom, working hard to bring you the latest breaking news in the cryptocurrency market. In the words of Elon Musk “Buy stock in several companies that make products & services that *you* believe in. Only sell if you think their products & services are trending worse. Don’t panic when the market does. This will serve you well in the long-term.”
