Ethereum Shadow Forks – Trustnodes

“We’ve been finalizing and producing blocks!” – says Parithosh Jayanthi, a developer at the Ethereum Foundation, after the Proof of Stake shadow fork went through successfully this Monday.

“This was the first time we attempted a mainnet-shadow-fork, we were expecting to learn a lot from the transition,” Jayanthi says. “The next week or so would be spent with sync tests against this fork and trying to trigger more edge cases. We plan on repeating it next week, for advanced users.”

The explorer shows blocks as you’d expect as well as token transactions, with this being a mirror of the mainnet, but connected to the Proof of Stake (PoS) Beacon chain.

“Inheriting the state of existing testnets allows us to stress test our sync assumptions as well as assumptions around how long it takes to build a block/timeouts.

Since we stay connected to the peers on the canonical chain, we import some of their transaction gossip as well,” Jayanthi says.

He further confirms that the “shadow fork does not affect the canonical chain in any meaningful way,” but “since we reuse the chainID and the gossip channels are still connected, transactions submitted to the shadow fork could be included in the main chain as well. Proceed with extreme caution.”

The Beacon Chain seems to be out of sync currently, but those running a node – and it’s for just advanced users for now – may see some pandas and confirmation they’re on the shadow fork as pictured above.

This has gone generally successfully with some minor problems illustrated nicely in green and red:

“Green=Good, Red=Bad,” Jayanthi says. And since there’s a lot more green than red here, it means it’s overall good because the network is moving and finalizing.

Speaking to Trustnodes, Jayanthi says that in regards to some of the minor problems, “we’re testing patches now. So we’d know more soon.”

The whole point of this is of course to catch such problems, and they’ll continue shadow forking until they’re all resolved, with a new shadow fork to be performed next week.

Asked if this clarifies much in regards to the timeline for the merge, Jayanthi says:

“Unfortunately it won’t say anything about the merge – that’s for the client teams to decide. Its just a positive sign that it went well.”

They’ve performed shadow forks on the Goerli testnet some three times recently, but they need to test with the mainnet level state to “test our sync assumptions as well as assumptions around how long it takes to build a block/timeouts.”

Which we take to mean they’re at the very final stages as these minor issues from testing on the mainnet itself are resolved.

Afterwhich they should be ready to set a block number for the merger of ethereum to full Proof of Stake, at which point stakers will take over the running of the network while Proof of Work miners are retired.

Something that will instantly take out of circulation the 13,000 eth daily new supply, worth about $40 million at current prices.

That will be followed by six months of no new supply entering circulation at all as stakers await for the unlocking of their rewards, during which fee burning will make ethereum deflationary with the asset so going from adding $40 million a day to the market to taking out from total circulation $10 million a day.

Thereafter at current usage level it should keep deflating at circa 2,000 eth a day, worth $6 million.

Making this one of the biggest event in crypto history with it now appearing to be just weeks away from the live launch.