Ethereum Devs Successfully Complete Merge Shadow Fork With No 'Client Incompatibility Issues'

Next week or roughly around four days from now, The Merge is expected to be implemented and Ethereum will transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). According to Ethereum developers, prior to the Paris upgrade, programmers successfully completed the 13th and last shadow fork.

Ethereum’s 13th and Last Shadow Fork Is Complete

On Friday, social media has been abuzz with chatter about The Merge and Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS. Furthermore, ETH developers and the Ethereum research and engineering company Nethermind revealed the last shadow fork is now complete. Basically, a shadow fork is an upgrade applied to the existing version of Ethereum’s mainnet, and the public, in general, is unaware of the testing phase.

So far, with the last shadow fork, ETH developers have executed 13 successful shadow forks. “Transition in Mainnet-Shadow fork-13 (the last shadow fork before The Merge) was successful for all Nethermind nodes,” the researchers from Nethermind said on Friday. Moreover, there’s a shadow net scanner, a shadow net mainnet explorer, and a shadow net Beacon Chain explorer as well, to help with testing.

Bitcoin.com reported on the pre-Merge upgrade called Bellatrix on September 6, which was the final pre-Merge transition before the Paris Upgrade. Paris will trigger The Merge and after the last PoW block is mined, an Ethereum validator will mine the following block. If that block is successfully mined by a validator, The Merge will be 100% complete.

“MSF13 merged earlier today, we saw attestation rate drop to -97%,” an Ethereum developer wrote after the shadow fork. “This was due to some stale data on one node that I forgot to clear up, the node thought it was on the wrong shadow fork. No other client incompatibility issues were seen.”

With the shadow fork completing successfully on Friday, it signals the readiness for The Merge, and entities running ETH software will need to upgrade. While some people celebrated the shadow fork, others criticized Ethereum and called it “centralized.” On Saturday, following the 13th shadow fork, the test was discussed a great deal on social media channels like Twitter and Reddit.

The Merge will execute when the network hits a Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) value on the execution layer, which will be 58750000000000000000000. This is estimated to happen on September 14, 2022, or roughly four days from when this post was written.