Ethereum Goerli testnet merge goes live before move to proof-of-stake


Ethereum is the world’s second-biggest cryptocurrency, and it’s giving bitcoin a run for its money.

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Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, just ran a final dress rehearsal ahead of a years-awaited upgrade that’s been billed as one of the most important events in the history of crypto.

Since its creation almost a decade ago, ethereum has been mined through a so-called proof-of-work model, involving complex math questions that massive numbers of machines race to solve and requiring an abundance of energy. Bitcoin mining involves a similar process.

Ethereum has been working to shift to a new model for securing the network called proof of stake. Rather than relying on energy-intensive mining, the new method requires users to leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint tokens. It uses far less power and is expected to translate into faster transactions.

The upgrade should go into effect in mid-September. The final test took place Wednesday at around 9:45 p.m. ET.

The price of ether, the token native to the ethereum blockchain, has been on an upswing the last month, rising nearly 80%, including a gain of 10% in the last 24 hours to around $1,875. However, it’s still down by about half this year.  

Ethereum’s transition has been repeatedly pushed back for the last several years because of major flaws in the implementations. Developers say it’s on track to take place in about a month, in light of Wenesday’s successful dry run.

Here’s what happened

One of ethereum’s test networks, or testnets, called Goerli (named for a train station in Berlin) simulated a process identical to what the main network, or mainnet, will execute in September.

Testnets allow developers to try out new things and make necessary tweaks before the updates roll out across the main blockchain. Wednesday night’s exercise showed that the proof-of-stake validation process substantially reduces the energy necessary for verifying a block of transactions, and also proved that the merger process works. 

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“Goerli has this badge of a bottom-up testnet,” said Josef Je, a developer who worked with the Ethereum Foundation and now runs a permissionless peer-to-peer lending platform called PWN. Je added that it was also the most used testnet at this point.

Je said the proof of stake on Goerli will be almost identical to how things will run on the mainnet.

The Ethereum Foundation’s blog says Goerli is “the closest to mainnet, which can be useful for testing smart contract interactions.”

Spotting the bugs

Tim Beiko, the coordinator for ethereum’s protocol developers, told CNBC that they typically know “within minutes” whether a test was successful. But they’ll still be looking out for many potential configuration issues in the hours and days ahead so they can quickly fix them.

“We want to see the network finalizing and having a high participation rate amongst validators and also make sure we don’t…



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