The first-ever “shadow fork” of the Ethereum ETH/USD mainnet went live on Monday.
What Happened: According to a Twitter update from Ethereum developer Parithosh Jayanthi, the shadow fork is a way to stress test the developers' assumptions around syncing and state growth before it is officially deployed on the mainnet.
Essentially, developers copy the mainnet data onto a testnet where they deploy all of the features planned for infrastructure upgrade.
Shortly after the shadow fork went live, developers observed “some minor issues” but was overall seen to be a successful event.
“The next week or so would be spent with sync tests against this fork and trying to trigger more edge cases,” stated Jayanthi.
The shadow fork network had processed over 1.8 million transactions with an average block time of 13.8 seconds, as per shared block explorer data by Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden.
The outcome of the shadow fork has been emphasized as a matter of importance by core Ethereum developers in deciding the timing of the Merge event.
The Merge refers to the official transition of Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake blockchain from Proof-of-Work. Bloomberg analysts estimated that ETH could be valued ahead of $9,000 following the event.
With validators staking ETH to run the network instead of miners producing blocks, the amount of energy involved in running the blockchain is also expected to see a drastic reduction.
Coinbase Global Inc COIN said earlier this year that staking yields post-merge could rise from around 4.3%-5.4% APR to upwards of 9%-12% APR.
Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, ETH was trading at $3,000 down 4.46% in the last 24 hours.
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