The beacon chain on the Sepolia testnet has now gone online, preparing the dress rehearsal for the merge and giving the developers of the Ethereum network valuable technical insights.
After merging with the beacon chain, the Sepolia testnet will then gradually reach a consensus by using Proof-of-stake (PoS) instead of Proof-of-work (pow). This provides an insight into what can happen when the Ethereum mainnet performs the merge.
The Ethereum Sepolia Beacon Chain has been deployed!
The Merge is coming https://t.co/IuJBnFp0Xx
– Crypto-Gucci.eth áµ andáµand (@CryptoGucci) June 20, 2022
The exact date of the merge of Sepolia has not yet been determined.
Testnet merges are essential for Ethereum developers and independent project developers using the Ethereum network to see what they can expect when the actual merge takes place. Ultimately, the merge of the Ethereum mainnet is intended to convert the entire network to the POS consensus. This should reduce the energy consumption of Ethereum by 99.9 percent.
Sepolia was launched in October 2021. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko confirmed in April that the Ropsten testnet will be phased out over time and replaced by Sepolia. Therefore, projects that run applications on Ropsten were encouraged to move their work to Sepolia to avoid complications.
Public testnets such as Sepolia and Ropsten are designed to replicate the operating conditions of their respective mainnets without affecting the current mainnet that is online. Ropsten is the longest-lived testnet and was launched in 2016. On June 8, this one did a merge. This was considered the first step for a merge test run for Ethereum.
The official date for the merge on the Ethereum mainnet has already been postponed several times. This is now planned for August 2022, but this planned launch could also be delayed due to a postponement of the Difficulty Bomb. Once the merge has been performed, the consensus layer is active. This was previously referred to as Ethereum 2.0.
The difficulty bomb is a feature of the Ethereum network that is designed to deter Ether (ETH) miners using physical devices by making it significantly more difficult to generate a new block.
In this context: Ethereum (ETH) in the Crisis – Crypto community Discusses Possible Use cases
The ETH price has risen by 3.53 percent in the last 24 hours and is now around $1,126, as the Cointelegraph price index shows.
