Ropsten, The Merge’s testnet has a problem

After the 7 block reorg incident yesterday (May 26) of Beacon Chain, the Ethereum network continues to receive a technical negative. The problem this time took place on the Ropsten testnet. So what happened and the extent of this incident is too serious? Let’s find out in the article below with CoinCu!

Starting from block #12308397 on the Ropsten testnet, in the Extra Data section, instead of reading the data about the name of the miner of that block, the user sees the words “WILL RECOVER ASAP.”

This incident worries many people, especially since Ropsten is the first testnet for The Merge event to test (estimated on June 8). The Merge will have a merger between the Beacon Chain (under PoS consensus) and an Ethereum 1.0 chain (PoW). The Ropsten testnet will now act as a test network for Ethereum 1.0.

In the process, the Beacon Chain will deploy a hard fork called Bellatrix. And because of this hard fork, the network will have to track a new complex concept, which is Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD).

TTD is the total difficulty of the blocks in the chain, up to a certain block milestone. For example, with block #12308397 above, the total difficulty is “43,668,978,043,374,127”. While the previous block #12308396 is “43,668,615,527,800,982”.

It is this total difficulty number that will be the measure to decide to activate the Bellatrix Hard fork. Instead of tracking and timing the implementation of the hard fork by block order, monitoring the total network difficulty will help ensure a certain level of security, and the new management is transferred to the Beacon Chain.

Beacon Chain as mentioned will monitor the difficulty of the TTD network to activate the hard fork. But this difficulty is affected by the hash rate. In short, the higher the hash rate, the harder it is for the validator, and the total network difficulty up to the time of that block will fluctuate greatly.

And indeed it was way too high on May 25th. The reason for the incident this time might just be a move…testing by the miners. On the testnet network, it is not too expensive to spend money to buy a mining machine and push the hash rate up.

Besides the negative news from the macro, on May 25, Beacon Chain also had a reorg problem causing the chain to be forked.

The testnet is back up and running, after being down for a while. At the same time, the miners have adjusted the appropriate TTD so that the Bellatrix hard fork can be implemented in the near future.

As to whether this crash can happen on the mainnet, the probability will be very low. Simply because the hashrate on the Ethereum Mainnet will be very expensive and not as cheap as on the Ropsten Testnet.

However, the effects of this behavior are there, as miners have to adjust the parameters, thereby delaying the test deployment date of The Merge on Ropsten, thereby delaying the deployment date on the Mainnet.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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Harold

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