Shadow Forks and Testnets: The Ethereum Merge Approaches

An eagerly anticipated consensus shift to proof-of-stake will take a few months longer, but the path is becoming clearer by the day

article-image

Blockworks exclusive art by axel rangel

share

key takeaways

  • Ethereum developers successfully completed a half dozen “shadow forks” of the mainnet and are rigorously testing The Merge
  • No date as been set yet, but developers are eyeing September as the most likely

For observers of Ethereum and investors in ether, the perennial question has been — for years — “Wen Merge?”

The launch of the proof-of-stake Beacon Chain on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet on May 30 represents a major milestone in a transition that has been in the works for about seven years, almost from the very beginnings of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency. 

Ethereum’s Beacon Chain has, since December 2020, operated in parallel to the mainnet — the chain on which all Ethereum dApps currently run. Ethereum Mainnet is still secured by proof-of-work, like Bitcoin, but The Merge will finally unite these two chains, permanently ditching the energy-guzzling miners and slashing Ethereum’s energy consumption by a projected 99.95%.

Officially that should happen in “Q3/Q4 2022,” and a firmer date has yet to be put on the table. On May 20, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told attendees at the ETH Shanghai Web3 Developer Summer that it could be as soon as August “if there are no problems.”

“There’s always a risk of delays, and so September is possible, and October is maybe possible as well, but The Merge is, at this point, looking like it’s very close to happening,” Buterin said.

Ethereum core developers, coordinated by Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation, have been quietly simulating The Merge process, like actors rehearsing and perfecting a play. And with each passing step in a rigorous chain of testing, the actual date comes more into focus.

That testing includes initiating a series of six “shadow forks” since April, the last of which occurred on Tuesday, and the launch of the Beacon Chain on the longest-running Ethereum testnet, Ropsten.

A shadow fork is when a new developer network is created by forking a live network using a small number of nodes. Ropsten — named, by convention, after a metro station in Stockholm, Sweden — is the closest to the production environment of Ethereum of all its testnets, and has operated continuously since 2016.

“Even before deploying to testnets, devs are continuously testing against past data and fixing all potential issues,” Kosala Hemachandra, founder and CEO of MEW (MyEtherWallet), told Blockworks.

“These devs are the best in the field, and I am confident that they will make sure [it] will deploy and function as expected.”

Now is a key time for the testing process. On Thursday, an upgrade to the testnet version of the Beacon Chain, known as Bellatrix, will prepare it for The Merge simulation. A precise time for that to occur will become known on Thursday, and The Merge on Ropsten is expected to take place on June 8. After that it will be a proof-of-stake chain, will have served its purpose, and is slated to be deprecated.

“This is the first dress rehearsal,” Beiko wrote on Twitter, complete with a dancer emoji. “PoW on testnets is hard to estimate, so keep an eye out 👀.”


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

recent research

Research Report Templates.png

Research

An overview of the Base Ecosystem, with a focus on market leaders.

article-image

Although bitcoin hitting $120k by year’s end is looking unlikely

article-image

About 270 million HYPE has been claimed, valued around $7.6 billion

article-image

Stanford professors David Mazières and Dan Boneh will lead the lab alongside a cohort of graduate student researchers

article-image

With more companies holding BTC, bitcoin yielding strategies could become “a new corporate finance norm,” CoinShares posed

article-image

The proposal comes after Polygon governance considered a controversial use of bridged liquidity for yield

article-image

Can the community balance its decentralized ethos with the need for inclusivity and constructive debate?