While Ethereum Merge is approaching closer, the Ethereum network has deployed a Shadow fork live for the ninth time successfully.
A shadow fork is part of the Ethereum Network’s trial just before the network consensus switch from PoW to PoS.
Unlike the hard fork on the mainnet, a shadow fork focuses on the possible minor changes unlike the hard fork required to execute Ethereum Merge which eventually occurs on the main protocol.
The first successful shadow fork took place in April and after that Ethereum has seen 9 shadow forks so far.
In a 9th shadow fork, developers assessed the updates and the releases used in the recent Sepolia hard fork “but on a more intensive network”, according to Ethereum developer, Paritosh.
Yesterday’s shadow fork took place at 00:00 UTC time when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was overridden at 53945568722258575228928. According to the report, there were no major glitches appeared during the process.
Surprisingly, the fork was completed much earlier at 00:00 UTC than expected at 15:00 UTC. However, this large variation in time came due to miss calculation in the tool that the developer uses in spite of an error in the code itself.
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Parithosh told, “There seems to have been a minor spike in hashrate that sped up things a bit. The TTD estimation tool I use is also a local tool, it caches a lot of blocks and tries to average things out. It seems to have a lot of stale state since I haven’t cleared the old state.”
He added, “There were, however, no problems that were attributed to the TTD being hit earlier. All the nodes were ready except for a few syncing nodes. So this is a good sign that even when TTD is hit much earlier than expected, the network works as expected.”
Paritosh made clear that developers would rely on multiple TTD estimation methods to prevent similar situations on the mainnet.
