Ethereum’s tenth shadow fork went into effect yesterday, 26 hours earlier than expected, as the network continues to run tests ahead of the anticipated merge from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. In preparation, Ethereum has been undergoing a series of test forks which copy data from the main network (mainnet) to a test environment network (testnet).
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Yesterday’s shadow fork occurred at 11:45 UTC when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was overridden at 54,892,065,290,522,348,390,492 at block 15217902.
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The shadow fork brings the project one step closer to Ethereum’s mainnet upgrade in September. The third and final testnet merge, Goerli, is expected to happen August 10.
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Ethereum DevOps Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi told CoinDesk that this shadow fork will test releases that approximate the releases that will be used in the Goerli merge.
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As for why it happened earlier than expected, Jayanthi said that there was a clear change in the hashrate that could have sped up the process.
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This will not be the last mainnet shadow fork, and Ethereum will continue to run mainnet shadow forks until the Merge.
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No significant glitches have been reported.
Read more: Merge Testing on Ethereum: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
