Ethereum Crosses $3,500 as Mainnet to Shadow Fork – Trustnodes

Eth’s ratio has risen above 0.075, up circa 5% from 0.072 as the currency returns upwards after a little dip.

The burning and transactions seem to be fairly stable, so this may just be a continuation of bullishness in eth.

That follows a Core Dev call where they detailed a lot of problems with the Goerli shadow merger fork.

“The first shadow fork this week found several issues in clients related to timeouts. The second, encouragingly, went a bit smoother. We are planning a third shadow fork of Goerli Monday and then a mainnet shadow fork later next week!” – said Tim Beiko, the eth1 co-ordinator.

So forks all around, and nowadays some eth heads love these forks more than NFTs, Apes, or even POAPs.

But a fork on the main net itself is a bit unexpected as that’s on the live ethereum network!

“The mainnet shadow fork will be a great way to collect data about how post-merge nodes behave in mainnet conditions, and how the large blocks, state and history affect node sync, stability, performance, etc.,” Beiko says.

A shadow fork is kind of half way to the merge where you mirror the main-net blocks, make a replica of it, and get those replicas to ‘talk’ to the Beacon Proof of Stake (PoS) chain.

They have what is called an Execution Payload which makes it ‘real’ because it’s executing.

The current live Beacon doesn’t have this Execution Payload, unless we’re mistaken. It will get it next week.

That will let the devs get a clearer understanding of how the network will run once only stakers are doing all the work, starting off with these training wheels of sorts that are then taken off.

They doing it on mainnet so quickly after testnet because it’s still kind of its own network, and because they’ve forked and forked Goerli so hard about three times now so presumably they’re sufficiently confident to mainnet it.

Yet it’s not completely without risks as blocks can get lost and make their way to mainnet somehow, but it’s appnin.

Which is a bit of a surprise to us as we though there would be some other testnets to fork first, like Rikby, but that just goes to show this is a different sort of upgrade and unlike any we’ve seen before.

The stakes are very high of course, and so they’re doing some magic of peaking into how the staking only network will behave while still having the current running ethereum as not just a backup, but frontup.

Which means they’re doing everything to be as sure as one can be that the transition will be very smooth.

And after years of development and months of testing, they’ve now reached the stage where they can do things on the live ethereum itself.

Which means our June target still stands. That’s not frozen in stone of course and won’t be frozen until a block number is set, but from what we can see and considering the rate of development so far, another two months of refining should be sufficient to reach the stage of setting a block.

That presumes all goes fine and obviously it’s for the devs and their judgment to decide, but to us all this is pretty much imminent in the Joe Biden sense of ‘imminent’ in as far as all gotta get ready because it’s probably happening in just weeks which is pretty much imminent timewise if you’re running staking services or nodes.