The anticipation for Ethereum’s much awaited merge into proof-of-stake consensus is nearly here.
Ethereum’s network engineers have run test after test in the frantic lead-up to Ethereum’s much-awaited merge in order to ensure everything goes according to plan when the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization switches to proof of stake early next week.
Ethereum completed today one of the most important test before finally transitioning to a token staking consensus, expected to take place between September 13 and 15th.
The test, which was a shadow fork of the Ethereum mainnet appears to have gone off without a hitch earlier today.
Shadow forks are concentrated tests of certain portions of the merging that look for faults and replicate the process of changing the Ethereum mainnet’s underlying mechanism from the present proof-of-work mining model to proof of stake, which will put a stop to mining on the network.
Better News Than The Last “Bellatrix” Network Test
Although successful, last week’s Ethereum test, known as “Bellatrix” was not a home run.
When the “missing block rate” increased by almost 1,700%, the Ethereum network experienced some issues.
The missed-block-rate statistic gauges how frequently a block of transactions scheduled for validation is not validated by the Ethereum network. This problem typically affects 0.5% of blocks, but in the hours after the Bellatrix update, that percentage shot up to 9%.
The developers explained that the hickup in the network during Bellatrix was due to a number of node operators being unprepared since they hadn’t updated their clients to include merge-ready software. The people and businesses who run nodes are responsible for maintaining the Ethereum network’s backend infrastructure.
25.2% of Ethereum’s nodes have not updated their software as of the Bellatrix upgrade. According to Ethernodes, that number has decreased to 15.4% as of this writing.
