Ethereum's First-Ever 'Shadow Fork' Goes Live: Why It's Significant

The first-ever “shadow fork” of the Ethereum ETH/USD mainnet went live on Monday.

What Happened: According to a Twitter update from Ethereum developer Parithosh Jayanthi, the shadow fork is a way to stress test the developers' assumptions around syncing and state growth before it is officially deployed on the mainnet.

Inheriting the state of existing testnets allows us to stress test our sync assumptions as well as assumptions around how long it takes to build a block/timeouts. Since we stay connected to the peers on the canonical chain, we import some of their transaction gossip as well.

— parithosh | (@parithosh_j) April 10, 2022

Essentially, developers copy the mainnet data onto a testnet where they deploy all of the features planned for infrastructure upgrade.  

Shortly after the shadow fork went live, developers observed “some minor issues” but was overall seen to be a successful event.

The merge pandas have arrived!
mainnet-shadow-fork-1 hit TTD ~half an hour ago. We've been finalizing and producing blocks!

We quickly noticed some seemingly minor issues with Nethermind and Besu(triage ongoing). Erigon is currently syncing to head, status update later. https://t.co/iJFtZTp7UU pic.twitter.com/9GxPp8dFzs

— parithosh |  (@parithosh_j) April 11, 2022

“The next week or so would be spent with sync tests against this fork and trying to trigger more edge cases,” stated Jayanthi.

The shadow fork network had processed over 1.8 million transactions with an average block time of 13.8 seconds, as per shared block explorer data by Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden.

The outcome of the shadow fork has been emphasized as a matter of importance by core Ethereum developers in deciding the timing of the Merge event.

Next Monday, devs are planning to shadow fork Ethereum mainnet to test the Merge. @TimBeiko emphasized the outcome of this shadow fork will be important to deciding Merge timing.

— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) April 7, 2022

The Merge refers to the official transition of Ethereum into a Proof-of-Stake blockchain from Proof-of-Work. Bloomberg analysts estimated that ETH could be valued ahead of $9,000 following the event.

With validators staking ETH to run the network instead of miners producing blocks, the amount of energy involved in running the blockchain is also expected to see a drastic reduction.

Coinbase Global Inc COIN said earlier this year that staking yields post-merge could rise from around 4.3%-5.4% APR to upwards of 9%-12% APR.

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, ETH was trading at $3,000 down 4.46% in the last 24 hours.