The Ethereum Foundation made headlines last month after announcing the Kintsugi Merge Testnet in December. The main purpose of the testnet is to experiment and identify issues with Ethereum after the merger. AllCoreDevs on Ethereum calls it the “first public, easily accessible, multi-client testnet running Ethereum post-merger!”
Following the same, now, Chair Tim Beiko has updated the community that applications will start testing deployments on Kintsugi soon. Subsequently,
“His next release, Kiln, will be the dress rehearsal before the transition from existing testnets.”
So, essentially, Kiln will replace Kintsugi. And, with Ethereum setting the sun on Kintsugi in the coming weeks, the foundation has also announced a community call on 11 February.
During this time, the team would also have identified some problems on the network, which are being worked on. The developers also announced changes to the API Engine specification to address the same issue.
Parallely, the team further announced that it is working on the Shanghai hard fork. It was initially pushed for last year, a couple of months after the London hard fork. However, with a focus on The Merge emerging soon, Shanghai was delayed. According to Beiko,
“Shanghai is slowly being planned, with a focus on valuable EIPs that had been deprioritized, as well as beacon chain withdrawals.”
So far, withdrawal from the beacon chain doesn’t have a formal Ethereum Improvement proposal (EIP). So, more information is expected in this regard in the coming days.
Meanwhile, some of the small upgrades mentioned by the developers may be coming to the network with Shanghai. These include the EVM object format, BLS precompiles, EIP-3074, EIP-4488, and EIP-1153. It will also focus on reducing transaction costs.
The Shanghai hard fork will be a crucial upgrade towards merging ETH and ETH 2.0. Especially since some of the terminology has recently been “phased out” ahead of the merge. Ethereum Foundation explained that ‘Eth1’ and ‘Eth2’ will be merged into a single chain. Therefore, Ethereum Mainnet “merge” with the Beacon Chain removes the two distinctions and makes way for only Ethereum.
“As part of this roadmap, the existing proof-of-work chain (Eth1) would eventually be deprecated via the difficulty bomb. Users and applications would migrate to a new Ethereum proof-of-stake chain, known as Eth2.
After this, ETH developers will announce transitioning testnets to proof of stake.
“A successful transition across all existing testnets is the last step before setting the date for The Merge on mainnet!”
