Ethereum (ETH) Mainnet Shadow Fork Teased Ahead of Dencun

Ethereum developers are teasing a mainnet shadow hard fork to occur before the release of the Dencun upgrade.

According to the latest Ethereum ACDE call report compiled by Christine Kim, ETH developers have confirmed that a shadow fork of the Ethereum mainnet will be performed sometime after Devnet #10 to further test the Dencun upgrade. This will possibly be in parallel with testing efforts on public testnets.

gm, here’s my writeup of this week’s Ethereum dev call where devs talked about ongoing issues and bugs on Devnet #9 and had a long debate on the merits of EOF.https://t.co/CbYKBaFlmZ

— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) October 13, 2023

Ethereum developers are gearing up for the upcoming release of Devnet #10. According to the article, Devnet #10 might be ready, hopefully next week.

Barnabas Busa, an Ethereum engineer, underlined that developers are still working through “big questions” in the process of testing Dencun.

Developers may not proceed with the launch of Devnet #10, likely the final devnet for Dencun, before the upgrade is launched on public Ethereum testnets like Goerli, until these questions are answered.

The forthcoming Devnet #10 will include a large validator set, maybe with 330,000 active validators. Its launch criteria include updated trusted setup files from the EIP 4844 KZG ceremony, improved visibility for blob transactions, the MEV pipeline and network stability.

The current Devnet #9 has a 93% participation rate, which means that 93% of validators are actively participating in network consensus. The 7% of invalidators that are not operational are mostly Geth (EL) and Teku (CL) validator nodes.

The Dencun upgrade contains the eagerly awaited Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, often known as proto-danksharding, which seeks to improve scalability and lower transaction costs on Layer 2 rollup solutions like Arbitrum and Optimism.

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