Ethereum Approaches Major Upgrade With Ropsten Public Testnet

Ethereum’s core development team has reached a new milestone with the release of the Ropsten public testnet, which will now undergo an upgrade to its revised proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, in anticipation its implementation on the Ethereum mainnet.

The upgrade is scheduled for June 8th, with the code for its configuration appearing in a pull request made by Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathi (parithosh). This pull request was first seen in the eth-clients GitHub repo earlier this week.

Alongside this upgrade, the Ethereum Foundation has also disclosed that it will be doubling reward payouts for its bug bounty program, in a bid to hasten the development of the Ethereum mainnet client and provide reliable security and technical audits for its backend. According to the Ethereum Foundation, its bug bounty program will continue to offer payouts in a tiered system, providing rewards for developers and penetration testers who can find critical vulnerabilities which may have a potentially devastating impact, or may occur with a higher likelihood.

Bug bounty participants may receive up to $250,000 in ETH or DAI according to the program’s scope. Given the blockchain protocol’s commitment to double this as it approaches a major upgrade on its mainnet, the maximum amount for Ethereum bug bounty has now gone up to $500,000.

“There are already multiple efforts being organized by client teams and the community to further increase knowledge and expertise across the two layers. Unifying the Bounty Program will further increase visibility and coordination efforts on identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities.” shares Ethereum developer Fredrik Svantes in an announcement of the bug bounty program’s increased rewards.

Ethereum’s merge has been ongoing for some time now, with its switch from proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensul model being tested across several shadow forks. This shadow fork constitutes a technical resemblance with the Ethereum mainnet, allowing the Ethereum core developers to test out functionalities on a safe, non-live environment and create projections of how it will run once fully switched.

Ethereum Foundation developer Tim Beiko has since commented that the upgrade is not yet ready from a technical standpoint, while also claiming that it will be delayed for a few more months after June.

It won’t be June, but likely in the few months after. No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of PoW on Ethereum

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth ?? (@TimBeiko) April 12, 2022

Analysts across the crypto industry expect the Ethereum merge to present drastic reductions to the amount of energy consumed by its blockchain due to being built over a PoW framework. With this, the rate of issuance for new Ethereum tokens will be cut down by roughly 90%, effectively adding a renewed deflationary pressure to Ethereum if mean demand for ETH is maintained.

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