Ethereum developer Tim Beiko recently announcement the launch of Kintsugi Merge Testnet, calling it an opportunity for the community to experience Ethereum post-merger. Beiko declared,
“Over the past few months, client teams have been working tirelessly to implement a new set of merge milestones. They are now live on a new testnet: Kintsugi.”
The idea of the testnet is to let “projects start testing and prototyping on Kintsugi to highlight potential issues” as they might appear once Ethereum merges with the Beacon Chain.
Meanwhile, Ethereum’s blog post states that all feedback and clarifications will be taken on Discord for further improvements.
That said, while ETH 2.0 is on the way, it’s not quite ready with the Proof-of-Stake model just yet. It is only after the community has tested the merger of the POW and POS models that the channel can fully switch to POS.
Let’s recall that Ethereum’s PoS-based Beacon Chain has been up and running since the end of last year.
With the Arrow Glacier upgrade starting on December 9, the merger is slated to take place before June 2022. With this event in mind, the EIP-4345 difficulty bomb date was slated for June 2022.
In terms of the price action, a recent report by CryptoCompare had pointed out how ETH has been the best performing asset in November. With the return estimated at 7.9% during the month.
Recently, former Argentine president Mauricio Macri also described Ethereum as one of the “most innovative” decentralized technologies of the century. He said so in a post after meeting project co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Quite recently, co-founder Vitalik Buterin had stated that “Ethereum is very well-positioned to adjust to this future world, despite inherent uncertainty.” While it is not possible to know how PoS transition will be implemented at the moment, Buterin had shared a “plausible roadmap” of the chain’s future, adding,
“Ethereum is open to all futures and does not have to commit to a win-win opinion.”
It is also worth noting that at the time of writing, ETH 2.0 deposit contracts topped the staked value of 8,732,084 Ether.
