Shadow Fork: The Merge Is Closer
The Hangover: April 11th
Shadow Fork: The Merge Is Closer
Ethereum devs know about naming.
What's going on today? The Ethereum first mainnet shadow fork went live today
What they did? They mirrored Ethereum mainnet (PoW) blocks to the Beacon Chain (PoS)
What does this mean? Ethereum devs got a sense of how the post-merge nodes will behave in the mainnet.
How? Transactions of the network are mirrored on a merged PoS network, in this case, the Beacon Chain.
Shadow forking has been useful for Ethereum devs to test the merge and assure a smooth transition by testing various performance parameters such as:
A healthy network transition during merge
Transactions
Deployment and interactions between smart contracts
Inclusion of invalid transactions and malicious validators and so on...
Goerli was successfully shadow forked a while ago and let devs test different merge scenarios
This was what gave Ethereum devs the confirmation that it was time to shadow fork the Ethereum mainnet.
What's next? Devs will continue to shadow forking Ethereum mainnet as some issues with block syncing are still pending.
But the team said these issues were not a major problem.
The next shadow fork should happen by next week.
Once these issues are solved, they can be ready to set a block number for the real merge of the Ethereum mainnet (Pow) with the Beacon Chain (PoS).
What are the numbers behind? According to Trustnodes, The Merge will take out of circulation 13K of $ETH or $40M of new daily supply.
After this will follow a period of six months without new supply entering the market as stakers will be waiting for the unlock of their rewards.
Here, is where Ethereum burning mechanisms will play the game and take something like $10M in $ETH a day.
So far, all looking good for Ethereum.