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ETH Launches First-Ever Mainnet Shadow Fork
Summary: Ethereum’s first mainnet shadow fork launched today as developers transition the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model. A mainnet is the end product of a blockchain project, while the testnet would be the previous form of the mainnet used strictly for testing. Parithosh Jayanthi, an Ethereum Foundation ...
Ethereum’s first mainnet shadow fork launched today as developers transition the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model. A mainnet is the end product of a blockchain project, while the testnet would be the previous form of the mainnet used strictly for testing.
Parithosh Jayanthi, an Ethereum Foundation developer shared the news via Twitter, tweeting “The merge pandas have arrived! mainnet-shadow-fork-1 hit TTD ~half an hour ago. We've been finalizing and producing blocks!”
Jayanthi wasn’t the only developer that tweeted about the news, Marius Van Der Wijden, a seasoned researcher and developer said, “Today will be the first mainnet shadow fork ever.”
On April 10, Jayanthi tweeted that the shadow fork is a way to “stress test our assumptions around syncing and state growth” and “a way to check if our assumptions work on existing testnets and/or mainnet.”
Jayanthi noted that the shadow fork will share data with the main Ethereum network, so some transactions could appear on both networks. The shadow fork has already processed 1,800,201 with an average block time of 13.3 seconds according to a block explorer page shared by Van Der Wijden.
Author: Tyler Irvin
