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.
