The Ethereum Medalla testnet launched at 1 pm UTC on Tuesday, hit a roadblock when it didn’t go as per plan. The Medalla test network for Ethereum 2.0 was initially launched successfully and managed to get sufficient number of blocks at the supposed genesis time but the participation number was way too below than it had anticipated. The block participation was mere 57% than the earlier anticipated 80%.
This means that validators who had staked had no prior coordination with the development team. As per data over 20000+ validators had staked a total of 750,272 GöETH. Medalla partnered with Prysmatic Labs’ Prysm, ChainSafe’s Lodestar, PegaSys’ Teku, Status’ Nimbus and Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse with an aim of achieving wider diversity.
Eth 2.0 Medalla multi-client testnet is live! This is Ethereum 2.0's Final Testnet.
If everything works as planned, we may see the Mainnet being launched as early as November 4th!
I'm so bullish on #Ethereum! pic.twitter.com/mRhqk3BcyP
— BATMAN ⚡ (@CryptosBatman) August 4, 2020
Newer Challenges for Ethereum
The lack of participation is a critical issue as it poses challenges in achieving the block finality. Apparently it seems that achieving finality is impossible until the network starts removing all the validators who are offline.
Validators May Have Forgotten To Update Their Nodes
A tweet by Preston Vanloon, announced that the testnet was consistently finalizing. He also mocked at the validators who were offline during the genesis and forgot to update or start their nodes. He called the launch of the Medalla testnet a successful one and is looking forward to the next few months of experimenting before the ETH 2.0 finally rolls out.
Medalla is now consistently finalizing!
It seems some validators were still asleep at genesis and forgot to update or start their nodes 😏
Overall, a successful genesis launch for Medalla. Looking forward to the next few months of testing before landing ETH2 on mainnet!! https://t.co/16SqTjlDCg
— prestonvanloon.eth (@preston_vanloon) August 4, 2020
The developers said that this may be because the validators who participated by depositing 32 ETH weren’t operating the validator software.
Ethereum Foundation Worker Updates on the Medalla Finalisation
Another tweet by a developer at Ethereum Foundation Hudson Jameson, said that the testnet is finally justified and finalised which means that the required number of validators are online. In the following thread, he said that the low number of validators is improving as more and more validators are finally coming online. He further went on saying that testnets are designed for this and he is excited to experience the situations after more and more validators start coming online.
2/2 low number of validators and how it will improve as more validators come online! This is what testnets are for and I'm excited to see the situation develop as we get more folks online on the testnet. Get hype. Eth2 is coming 🙂
— Hudson Jameson (@hudsonjameson) August 4, 2020
The developer team is looking onto the matter and all the inactive validators are expected to be removed in an hour or so. The launch of Medalla Tesnet marks a step towards the launch of the much awaited ETH 2.0 upgrade.
