The Urge to Merge - The Daily Gwei #497
Have you got the urge to merge?
Well it happened - Ropsten became the first public testnet to run through the merge transition and it did it very successfully. For an preliminary summary/breakdown of how the transition went, you can read this thread from Pari here. For more context around the Ropsten merge event itself, continue reading below!
It was quite fun partaking in the EthStaker Ropsten Merge livestream event where there was a mix of technical insights, friendly banter and of course, Jonathan Mann singing us some great improvised songs. After we waited on the stream for a little while Ropsten managed to hit its target TTD and the merge transitioned happened with the friendly little panda that you see above gracing the terminals of Ropsten nodes everywhere.
The way I think of these public testnet merges is like the final rehearsals before a big high-stakes stage play. Obviously getting The Merge right on mainnet is absolutely critical and a merge “failure” could lead to catastrophic consequences considering that Ethereum secures billions of dollars worth of value. Just like any big failure of a stage play on the live stage can sour the whole experience for the crowd and lead to a loss of confidence for the actors as well. This is why rehearals (testing) is so important - we want everything to happen as smoothly as possible!
Lastly, what I always love about these events is how they bring the whole Ethereum community much closer together. It doesn’t matter if you’re a core dev or just a casual observer, being part of this community should fill you with a great sense of pride and excitement. We are literally making history and partaking in the development of a network that will (hopefully) live for centuries and provide immense value to the world during that time - and we are basically still at day 0 of this journey.
So where to from here? Well the Goerli (or Sepolia) testnet will run through the merge transition in a few weeks with the Sepolia (or Goerli) testnet running through it a few weeks after that. In the meantime, mainnet shadow forks will still keep happening, bugs will be ironed out, the mainnet execution layer and consensus layer will be upgraded in preparation for the mainnet merge and I’ll keep tweeting out that “The Merge is coming” - very fun times ahead for everyone!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.