Merging Ropsten is a major testing milestone toward Ethereum’s Merge that is expected to happen later on in the year, explained Preston Van Loon, a core developer at Prysmatic Labs.
The Ethereum ecosystem is gearing for a big testing milestone, with the Ropsten testnet merge coming on 8th June 2022.
Ropsten is Best Replication of the Big Merge
Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathi gave a pull request for Ropsten testnet Merge code last week, suggesting that the implementation is ready, according to the Merge testnets page on GitHub.
Ropsten is one of the top testnets developed by the Ethereum Foundation back in 2017 and maintained by the Geth developer team. This testnet is considered the best replication of Ethereum Mainnet because it employs the same structure. This means that developers are able to run realistic deployment testing prior to the actual mainnet.
Ropsten testnet merger will experience the proof of stake (POS) and proof of work (POW) protocols combined, with the genesis set for 30th May, 2022. It will simulate what will take place during the actual Merge, with the beacon chain taking place immediately after as a POS network.
Developers have been posting their growing expectations about the testnet online. One of them, Preston Van Loon, from Prysmatic Labs had this to say:
“Ropsten testnet is getting merged on 8th June! Merging Ropsten is a huge testing milestone towards Ethereum’s mainnet Merge later this year.”
Note that the timelines for the testnets fall within the comments given by Tim Beiko, who indicated that the merge would go live a few months after June. “No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of PoW on Ethereum,” Beiko said.
Another major indicator that things are on the course is the Ethereum Foundation’s announcement that it had managed its POS and POW mainnet consensus layer bug bounty into one. This implies that the reward now stands at USD250,000 for every bug reported on Ethereum. During important periods, such as upgrades, the reward can shoot up.
“In total, this marks a 10x increase from the previous maximum payout on Consensus Layer bounties and a 20x increase from the previous max payout on Execution Layer bounties,” read the announcement.
