Beacon Chain, the Sepolia Testnet, has finally gone live and has also set the stage for its merge dress rehearsal which would give the developers of Ethereum some valuable insight into the technicalities of it all. Upon merging with the dedicated testnet, Sepolia will start reaching consensus using the proof-of-stake rather than the proof-of-work, which would also provide data on what could happen when the mainnet of ETH started performing its merge. Interestingly, the exact date of the merge of Sepolia has not yet been determined.
Ethereum’s Latest Testnet Merge
Testnet merges can be quite useful to the developers of Ethereum and most of the independent project developers who have been using the network of ETH to understand what they can potentially expect when the actual merge would be taking place. Just like on the testnets the mainnet merge of the cryptocurrency will definitely see the entire network transition to a POS consensus and should ideally reduce the consumption of energy of ETH by 99.9%.
Sepolia, for those who are uninformed, was launched in October of 2021. Tim Beiko, the developer of Core ETH went on to confirm in April that the Ropsten testnet would definitely be phased out over time and then replaced with Sepolia.
Most of the public testnets like Ropsten and Sepolia are usually designed to replicate the operating conditions of their respective mainnets without affecting the live mainnet- which in this case is Ethereum’s mainnet. Ropsten is also the longest-lasting testnet that was officially launched in 2016. It then went through a merge on the 8th of June, which was the very first instance of any form of a merge trial run for ETH.
The official merge date on the mainnet of Ethereum has also been pushed back quite a few times by now.
