The Ethereum development team successfully launched the final Multiclient Medalla Testnet for Phase O (Beacon Chain), on 4th August and right on schedule.
This follows a recent update by Ethereum developer Terence Tsao who said the Medulla genesis state had achieved over 20,000 validators across its five clients; Lighthouse, Prsym, Teku, Nimbus and Lodestro.
An earlier report by Ethereum Developer Ben Edgington had also stated that Medalla’s success will set the stage for mainnet launch in 2020.
“Ethereum 2.0, the Medalla Testnet is due to live on August the 4th, and it is probably our one and only dress rehearsal before the real thing later this year.”
The milestone accomplishment for the entire Ethereum and crypto community was streamed live on Youtube.
Ethereum Continues Satoshi’s Vision
Outside of the development team, the Ethereum 2.0 launch process, may fairly be perceived as complicated to keep up with. Beacon Chain is a brand new PoS blockchain that will serve as the backbone of the ETH 2.0 network and Medalla will be its last testnet before it’s hosted on the mainnet.
Beacon Chain has had multiple testnets, updates, and delays, and only presents the first phase out of three of Ethereum 1.0 migration to Proof of Stake consensus protocol.
The next phase will introduce Sharding, consisting of shard chains, another untested concept in the blockchain that if successful, will accomplish Ethereum’s dream of tackling the scalability problem. The final step will open up the system for the deployment of DApps and transaction processing.
The journey to migrate Ethereum to PoS started years ago, with Vitalik’s decision and determination to solve the scalability problem in blockchain development, once and for all. In 2014, Vitalik said:
“Ethereum 2.0 is pretty indefinite; all we’ve said is that we will either solve the scalability and consensus problem or die trying.”
6 years later, in the wake of Medalla’s launch, Vitalik now says Ethereum is a continuation of the dream that Satoshi had for Bitcoin as a global decentralized payments ecosystem. Vitalik was responding to an Ethereum meme by a user suggesting that Ethereum 2.0 will potentially make Bitcoin obsolete.
“IMO Ethereum isn’t anti-Satoshi, it’s a continuation of Satoshi’s vision.”
Lower Turnout Hiccup
Despite its successful launch, the project later ran into a turnout hiccup, with the recommended participation at genesis time only adding up 57% out of the expected 80%.
The setback means that the network won’t be able to achieve block finality until it cuts off all the 32 ETH stake validators that are offline.
Ethereum Foundation’s Danny Ryan said that two clients Nimbus and Lodestar account for 10% of offline validators, but the team is continuously investigating issues with validators and monitoring metrics.
