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Ethereum’s Ninth Shadow Fork Went Live
Summary: Ethereum’s ninth shadow fork went live on Thursday at 00:00 UTC when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was overridden at 53945568722258575228928, as the blockchain continues to test its imminent transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake model. Test forks are smaller, more docile tests that copy the data from the main network to a test environment ...
Ethereum’s ninth shadow fork went live on Thursday at 00:00 UTC when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was overridden at 53945568722258575228928, as the blockchain continues to test its imminent transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake model.
Test forks are smaller, more docile tests that copy the data from the main network to a test environment to test minor changes. This differs from a full testnet merge, which is a much larger operation. In this most recent test, developers focused on testing updates and releases used in the recent Sepolia hard fork on a more intensive network, a report from Coindesk claimed.
“There seems to have been a minor spike in hashrate that sped up things a bit,” a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation told CoinDesk. “The TTD estimation tool I use is also a local tool, it caches a lot of blocks and tries to average things out, it seems to have a lot of stale states since I haven't cleared the old state.”
Parithosh, the engineer, further noted that there were no problems attributed to the TTD being hit earlier, which means even if TTD is hit earlier than expected the network will still work as expected. In order to ensure this doesn’t happen on the mainnet, developers will use multiple TTD estimation methods.
This shadow fork brings the Merge one step closer to completion. The third and final testnet merge, Goerli, is expected to happen next month.
Author: Tyler Irvin
