The Ethereum should undergo the Ropsten public testnet upgrade. This is almost the final step before Ethereum proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus upgrade.
Ethereum’s long-await transition to the PoS consensus has been in discussion for at least several last years.
Some say this transition would be a fatal mistake that can kill the network. But some believe that PoS would help to solve Ethereum’s main problems like high transaction fees, energy efficiency, and volatility.
Anyway, seems like Vitalik Buterin and other leaders of Ethereum are planning PoS upgrade really soon.
Recently Ethereum developers announced their major ETH 2.0 network upgrade — the Ropsten public testnet.
Although we can barely understand what it really means, let’s try to dive into it.
Complicated Ethereum PoS upgrade
Firstly you should know that last time Ethereum developers have been working on The Merge, an upgrade to switch the network to the PoS consensus model.
The last month they also began testing how the switch would work on a shadow fork. A shadow fork is like a conceptually similar blockchain copy of a different network. A shadow fork mechanism helps to reduce execution during technical upgrade periods, so Ether developers can use it to prevent short-term volatility.
Developers announced their Ropsten public testnet will undergo on June 8. But soon Ethereum Foundation developer Tim Beiko said on Twitter that the upgrade had been pushed to the latter half of 2022. “It won’t be June, but likely in a few months after. No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of [proof- of-work] on Ethereum,” Beiko tweeted.
Once the network gets the upgrade to PoS consensus, ETH ‘miners’ will switch off and give the way to ‘validators’, who stake tokens to validate and secure the network. Like miners, validators would also be rewarded in ETH for their actions.
High bug rewards
During the mainnet upgrade, Ethereum Foundation raised rewards on offer from its bug bounty program, which launched in 2021. You can get the reward by founding the critical vulnerabilities. This is essential period before the Ethereum PoS upgrade becomes possible.
It has also now combined what used to be two separate programs for its execution, or Eth1, and consensus, or Eth2, layers. Bug bounty hunters can now earn up to $250 000 in Ethereum or DAI.
Earlier Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said that transition to Ether Layer 2 is one of his most contradictory ideas. Buterin thinks that this switch would help Ether survive truly extreme circumstances, and generate more revenue than the network operating cost.
“Many key apps on Ethereum already rely on far more fragile security assumptions than anything we consider acceptable in Ethereum protocol design,” Vitalik complained on Twitter.
Why have they postponed testnet?
Some Reddit users wrote that the Ethereum PoS upgrade would happen mid-August 2022.
“Mainnet shadow fork 4 was merged yesterday with no issues for any client. This means all the technical issues with the Merge are resolved!” one Redditor wrote this week.
Definitely, Ethereum is very close to its historical event. In April Ethereum devs even shared details that the shadow fork network had processed 1.8 million transactions with an average block time of 13.8 seconds. Now it seems that they again got some problems.
The first Ethereum transition phase called the Beacon Chain went live on December first, 2020.
Sources: Decrypt, Seeking Alpha
