Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency in the world and is giving Bitcoin a run for its money.
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EtherealThe second-largest cryptocurrency by market value has just undergone a final dress rehearsal ahead of a years-awaited upgrade that is heralded as one of the biggest events in crypto history.
Since its inception nearly a decade ago, ethereum has been mined through a so-called proof-of-work model. It involves complex mathematical equations that a large number of machines compete to solve, cast requires a large amount of energy. bitcoin mining follows a similar process.
Ethereum has been working to switch to a new model for securing the network called proof of stake. Instead of relying on energy-intensive mining, the new method requires users to leverage their existing ether cache as a means of verifying transactions and minting tokens. It uses much less power and is expected to translate into faster transactions.
The final test took place on Wednesday around 9:45 pm ET.
Ansgar Dietrichs, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, he said in a tweet that the most relevant metric for success when dealing with a drill like this is to look at time to completion. He called it “another successful test.”
A research associate at Galaxy Digital noted that the engagement rate after the test merge dropped and it looked like there might have been a problem with one of the clients, but overall it worked.
“A Merge = successful string ends,” Christine Kim wrote in a tweetadding that we’re likely to see similar kinds of issues with the update on the mainnet, “but the point is that the combination worked.”
The moment of The upgrade will be discussed at an Ethereum core developer meeting on Thursday. The previous orientation indicated that the merger It should come into force in mid-September.
Ethereum’s transition has been repeatedly delayed over the past few years. The core developers told CNBC that the merger has been progressing slowly, in order to allow enough time for research, development and deployment.
The price of ether, the native token of the ethereum blockchain, has been on a rally in the last month, rising nearly 80%, including a 10% gain in the last 24 hours to around $1,875. However, it has still been cut in half this year.
This is what happened
One of Ethereum’s test networks, or testnets, called Goerli (named after a train station in Berlin), simulated a process identical to the one that the mainnet, or mainnet, will run in September.
Testnets allow developers to test new things and make any necessary adjustments before the updates are rolled out to the main blockchain. Wednesday night’s exercise showed that the proof-of-stake validation process substantially reduces the energy required to verify a block of transactions, and also showed that the merge process works.
“Goerli has this badge of a bottom-up testnet,” said Josef Je, a developer who worked with the Ethereum Foundation and now runs a permissionless peer-to-peer lending platform called PWN.
Je added that it was the most widely used testnet at the moment, and proof of stake on Goerli will be nearly identical to how things will work on the mainnet.
the The Ethereum Foundation blog echoed that assessment, saying that Goerli is “closest to the mainnet, which can be useful for testing smart contract interactions.”
spotting the mistakes
Tim Beiko, the coordinator for ethereum’s protocol developers, told CNBC that they typically know “within minutes” if a test was successful. But they will continue to keep an eye out for many potential configuration issues in the coming hours and days so they can be fixed quickly.
“We want to see the network complete and have a high engagement rate among validators and also make sure we don’t run into bugs or unexpected issues,” Beiko said.
The easiest metric to track is engagement rate, that is, how many validators are online and doing their jobs, Beiko said. If the numbers go down, developers will have to figure out why.
Another key issue relates to transactions. Ethereum processes transactions in groups known as blocks. Beiko said that a clear indicator that the test went well will be if the blocks have real transactions and are not empty.
The last important check is whether the network is terminating, meaning that more than two-thirds of validators are online and accepting the same view of chain history. Beiko says it takes 15 minutes under normal network conditions.
“If those three things look good, then there’s a long list of secondary things to check, but at that point, things are going well,” Beiko said.
‘More accessible’
Since December 2020, the ethereum community has been testing the proof-of-stake workflow on a chain called a beacon, which runs alongside the existing proof-of-work chain. Beacon has resolved some key issues.
Beiko said the original proposal required validators to hold 1,500 ether, a stake now worth about $2.7 million, to use the system. The new proof-of-stake proposal lowers the bar and requires interested users to hold just 32 ether, or around $57,600.
“It’s still not a trivial sum, but it’s a much more accessible system,” Beiko said.
There have been other key developments ahead of Wednesday’s test. In June, Ethereum’s longest-running testnet, known as Ropsten, successfully merged its proof-of-work execution layer with the proof-of-stake beacon chain. It was the first major test of the process that the mainnet will go through next month, everything should go according to plan.
Beiko said that testing the merger has allowed developers to ensure that the software running the ethereum protocol is stable and “that everything built on top of the network is ready for the transition.”
