The Ethereum 2.0 team has formalized the release date of the first comprehensive testnet designed to simulate mainnet conditions.
Called the Medal, the new multi-client testnet is set to be the last before the mainnet is launched. Medal means “medal” in Spanish, a reference to the “Olympic” Ethereum 1.0 testnet that immediately preceded the full release.
According to a July 23 post by Danny Ryan, Eth 2.0 coordinator for the Ethereum Foundation, the Medal will be released no earlier than August 4 at 1 pm UTC. The release date is not set in stone as there are two necessary conditions for its release.
The first is the “minimum genesis time”, a manually set parameter that defines the earliest the testnet can be launched. The second condition involves the number of validators who signed up for the testnet. Medal will only start if at least 16,384 deposits have been committed for 32 ETH each 48 hours before the minimum time of genesis. If that fails, it will launch 48 hours after reaching the milestone.
Medal simulates the proposed Ethereum 2.0 core network as closely as possible, hence the minimum deposit requirement. Anyone can register to be a validator by depositing 32 ETH from the Goerli testnet.
Four clients will be ready for launch, with Nimbus and Teku as new pillars alongside Lighthouse and Prysm. There are four other clients in active development that are not yet available at launch. Ryan said he expects Lodestar to be “online somehow,” while taunting another “surprise customer.”
Clients are used to run nodes, and they define the blockchain in many ways. Compared to Geth’s dominance in Ethereum 1.0, the foundation aggressively lobbied for more customers for the next generation.
The community is expected to maintain the Medalla testnet, unlike previous iterations called “devnets”. In addition to the test network, the foundation also sponsors separate “attack networks” for white hat hackers to break.
Progress in Phase 1
The work currently being done configures the beacon chain for Ethereum 2.0. This will be the main coordinator of the different fragments. Ethereum users will be able to bet their ETH through a deposit agreement in Ethereum 1.0, but will not be able to transact with Ethereum 2.0 tokens, nor will they be able to recover them until Phase 1 starts.
Although Ethereum 1.0 was initially proposed as a separate chain until almost all of deployment 2.0, a proposal under study from December 2019 could significantly speed up the process. Eth 2.0 and 1.0 clients would hybridize so that the former would handle consensus and block validation, while the latter would pass all information about blocks and transactions. Ethereum 1.0 would essentially be one of the many snippets.
Implementation is currently underway and has achieved some key milestones. The Eth 1.0 Geth client was successfully modified to outsource its consensus, while a fragmentation simulation client was adapted to work with Ethereum 1.0 blocks.
