Medalla is Live - The Daily Gwei #43
The final eth2 phase 0 testnet starts chugging along.
Medalla is the name given to the final eth2 phase 0 testnet and it just went live a couple of hours ago. At time of writing, network participation is ~70% (read here for the reasons as to why it is currently lower than expected), there are ~20,000 active validators, around 250 active Beacon nodes and ~642k eligible ETH. You can keep track of all the stats here.
I watched the launch live on YouTube and it was really amazing to see that almost 2000 people were watching alongside me. Twitter was buzzing with excitement and everyone was posting screenshots of their validators coming online - it kind of felt like a SpaceX launch! I can’t even imagine how exciting of an event it’s going to be once mainnet goes live - I truly do think it’ll be the biggest thing to happen in crypto in a long time.
The main reason people are so excited about this testnet in particular is because, if no critical issues or bugs are found, this will be the final testnet that is run before a mainnet date is set for the launch of eth2 phase 0. Medalla is expected to run for about 2-3 months before that date is set. If you’d like to get involved as a validator on Medalla, head here to use the official eth2 launchpad.
I also wanted to note that the concept of eth2 has been around since the very early days of Ethereum (Vitalik spoke about Ethereum becoming a Proof of Stake and sharded chain in 2014/2015). It’s only after all the countless hours of work from hundreds (thousands?) of people over many years that we were able to see the launch of this final testnet with a full Proof of Stake mainnet configuration. There is simply no other crypto-network that even comes close to what eth2 is trying to achieve and I’m personally incredibly proud of all the people that made this happen!
If you want to read more about what the road ahead for eth2 looks like (and the design philosophy behind it), check out this post.
That’s it - keeping this post short and sweet for today as I’m going back to tending to my validators!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.