Ethereum Beacon Chain Launches on a New Testnet in Preparation for Upcoming Merge

As The Merge is set to occur in August, leading Ethereum developer, Tim Beiko announced on Tuesday that the Ropsten Beacon Chain had been launched as a testnet for Ethereum users. Ropsten will be the first longstanding testnet to run through The Merge, which marks the end of the PoW architecture of Ethereum.

A Step Closer to The Merge

The Ropsten testnet – created nearly five years ago and considered one of the best replicas for the Ethereum blockchain – mimics aspects of the ETH mainnet, making it a test model of what the Proof-of-Stake network may look like. For devs and validators, they can have a first glimpse into The Merge and what code-related problems they may encounter without affecting the mainnet.

According to Ethereum’s official blog post, the “Bellatrix” upgrade, scheduled for June 2, will pave the foundation for The Merge. A few days after this, a metric known as the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) that measures mining difficulty will be determined by miners to trigger the transition. Miners will then need to configure their nodes with the given value.

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko provided more details on the launch, stating that – in order to make The Merge happen – the Beacon Chain must launch the latest upgrade, and the TTD of the PoW side must be determined.

📣 Ropsten Merge Announcement 📣

Ethereum’s longest lived PoW testnet is moving to Proof of Stake! A new beacon chain has been launched today, and The Merge is expected around June 8th on the network.

Node Operators: this is the first dress rehearsal💃https://t.co/0fDHObLOmn

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🐼 (@TimBeiko) May 30, 2022

Besides, Beiko noted that there would be two more testnets to go through before the final shift to The Merge to ensure that the transition will be executed appropriately.

“After the Ropsten transition, two more testnets (Goerli and Sepolia) will be transitioned to proof-of-stake before focus shifts to mainnet.”

The Merge Likely Arriving in August

The Merge – the most highly anticipated event of the year to the Ethereum community – was confirmed earlier by Vitalik Buterin to occur around August this year. The process that converts Ethereum’s PoW consensus algorithm to PoS will make the network more energy-efficient and potentially burn more ETH than what will be created through validator rewards. Through The Merge, the second-largest cryptocurrency might become deflationary.

To prepare for The Merge, “Shadow fork” was launched in April. It was a mechanism to stress test the team’s assumptions around syncing and state growth and to locate critical vulnerabilities in the code that could be otherwise unnoticed using the testnets,