BitcoinWorld

Ethereum-1 (Courtesy: Twitter)
Latest News

How Medalla Testnet Hit By Low Participation Rate

Ethereum-1 (Courtesy: Twitter)
Ethereum-1 (Courtesy: Twitter)

Ethereum’s Medalla Beacon Chain testnet has been running since early August but participation is waning. The lead developers are eager to get beyond testing and launch the real thing, which could be around six weeks away.

Ethereum 2.0 developer Ben Edgington recently posted an update to highlight the latest news from Beacon Chain testing and development.

Last week, Edgington stated that the Zinken testnet was the final launch rehearsal. Zinken ran smoothly as planned, but as with the larger Medalla testnet, participation has been low. He feels that it is time to move on, adding;

“Not many days after that I expect the deposit contract to be deployed, with a target beacon chain genesis within about six weeks.”

Ethereum Medalla Lethargy

According to Etherchain, the Austrian firm building Ethereum blockchain explorers, Medalla has failed to achieve finality for the past 1,500 epochs. It added that testing has become very resource hungry and 8Gb of memory may not be enough any longer.

Edgington replied that he doesn’t expect this to be the case on a network with real value at stake which cannot be simulated on testnets;

“People will be working hard to keep the network finalising. It’s exactly why we need to move on from the testnets now.”

At the time of press, there was only 52% network participation on Medalla according to beaconcha.in. The system needs to reach 66% to achieve finality. There are still over 2.2 million simulated ETH (GöETH) staked but it needs a further 9,750 validators to function.

Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions. Crypto is not a legal tender and is subject to market risks. Readers are advised to seek expert advice and read offer document(s) along with related important literature on the subject carefully before making any kind of investment whatsoever. Crypto market predictions are speculative and any investment made shall be at the sole cost and risk of the readers.