First-Ever Mainnet Shadow Fork Plays Out on Ethereum (ETH): The Merge Is Almost Here

The first-ever mainnet fork has taken place on the Ethereum network successfully, according to an Ethereum developer, Parithosh Jayanthi.

This implies that the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has moved closer to the highly anticipated event known as The Merge, which is the transition of the network from Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism.

Ethereum Network Shadow Fork Was Successful

The update implies that PoS consensus algorithms are stress-tested on the Ethereum mainnet for the first time ever. As explained on Monday by Ethereum developer Parithosh Jayanthi, the Ethereum Goerli testnet experienced a similar procedure three times.

Parithosh Jayanthi noted:

“We’ve been finalizing and producing blocks! This was the first time we attempted a mainnet-shadow-fork. We were expecting to learn a lot from the transition. 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.”

He Jayanthi added that “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.”

He further assures that the “shadow fork does not affect the canonical chain in any meaningful way.” But he said since the chainID is reused 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.”

According to Jayanthi, Green represents Good, while Red stands for Bad. And the fact that there are lots more green than red as seen in the image above shows that the shadow fork brings the expected result and the network is moving and finalizing.

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