Ethereum 2.0 developers are to test the genesis block launch outside of the current testnet by the end of the month.
They say they plan to do a dress-rehearsal network launch, with a 2-3 day short-lived testnet.
According to devs meeting notes, the penultimate week of September is pencilled in for configuration parameters to be advertised. So around the 21st of September, with the launch expected one week after. That would be the 28th of September.
They’re also thinking of performing a mock hardfork of the network, which is the ultimate proof of decentralization.
You’d then expect soon after the deposit contract to launch on the current live ethereum network, so beginning the last phase of the genesis block launch.
That would probably be sometime next month if the network continues to run without any problems, with the genesis block launch dependent on the smart contract reaching a 500,000 eth threshold.
For the testnet, it did do so within a week, but of course that was test eth. However, there’s some 40,000 validators on the testnet and a ten day queue to join, so clearly there’s a lot of appetite for stake.
As there’s a minimum threshold, the deposit contract could even launch the first week or in the second week of November with that being the final step as then the code takes over.
Once that launches therefore, the genesis block would be imminent. So it’s unlikely it would go out before devs feel they are ready for the genesis block to launch, meaning early November rather than next month as some rumors suggest.
All is going well now. Clients have put up updates. Prysm for example says “November is still looking good for a launch from our perspective.”
They’re trying to get some standards to facilitate unslashable migration from one client to another, something quite vital.
After two years of hard work, Danny Ryan is relaxing now, doing handstands in New Orleans.
That was just a brief exercise however because he has began working on phase 1 testing.
This is a crucial phase for investors because it comes before the merger, when the current network is turned into a shard on ethereum 2.0.
Work on the merger appears to be at advanced stages, so once phase 1 is out, then a circa 80% drop in ethereum’s inflation to near 0 would by that point be imminent.
Then there’s full sharding which is in years not months. Maybe 2022 optimistically when other fully functional shards are added to the ethereum 2.0 network, so multiplying its capacity.
Capacity however is currently set and managed by miners. So once it is handed over to stakers during the merger, the stakers may well take different views and may increase capacity earlier in addition to miners potentially also thinking at some point of increasing it.
Meaning capacity is a continuum of sorts and unlike in bitcoin, it’s easily changeable, but that’s more a linear potential increase, while sharding has a multiplying effect.
Just what sort and in what way, remains to be seen, but eth is now moving and at the protocol level, it is moving bigly.
