It’s the final countdown in ethereum Proof of Stake (PoS) development as preparations are undertaken to launch the last public testnet before the merge.
“We’d like the Kiln testnet to be the last public testnet,” says Parit Hosh, who describes himself as Validator Whisperer at the Ethereum Foundation, before adding:
“If all client teams are ready next week, we would like to launch Kiln with the full v2 spec.”
They pushed back the launch to next week to allow for more “documentation, tooling and client readiness,” with a dev5 dev-net launched today. It has the same configuration (pictured above for devnet5) as the soon to be launched testnet, allowing devs to start playing already.
“We have two goals with these testnets — harden the software to prepare for production and ensure users can test their setups,” Danny Ryan, the ethereum 2.0 coordinator, says.
Suggesting the years and years of development for ethereum full Proof of Stake have reached their conclusion with just some final testing now to make extra sure everything is good to go live.
Usually this testnet period lasts for about three months presuming all goes well, so The Merger where ethereum becomes full PoS may go out as soon as this summer.
That will kick out Proof of Work miners from the network with ethereum thereafter to be run only by stakers.
At that point, ethereum will become fully green, with no environmental concerns at all as there will be no ASICS or GPU miners in the network. Instead, only those that deposit eth to put down a stake in the network, will be running eth.
In addition, ethereum’s yearly inflation rate will drop to 1%, from currently 4%, as all the new supply that would have gone to miners is no longer distributed.
That will make ethereum rarer and perhaps even deflationary considering every transaction made in the ethereum network takes out some of the supply through fee burning.
Almost two million eth has now been burned through that mechanism in seven months, offsetting about 60% of the issuance.
Once it’s only stakers, more eth will be burned than comes on as new supply, making that a crypto buyback of sorts.
Where that investment perspective is concerned, this is thus the biggest upgrade in ethereum since it launched in the summer of 2015.
Technically it is the biggest upgrade as well so far because it transforms the network into one run by validators with just home computers rather than big vast mining farms.
Come summer, those miners will have to find something else to mine unless they just keep on mining the current PoW ethereum network to see if anyone still wants to buy their coins after the eth devs and dapp devs go to the Proof of Stake blockchain.
If they do keep running it, and if people do keep buying the… erm PETH blockchain for Proof of Work ETH, then ethereans will have one of the biggest airdrop, if not the biggest airdrop, in crypto history.
That’s because they’ll get two of every single thing on eth, DAI, CRV, NFT tokens, everything will copy clone with such a thing never quite seen before.
It may well be the big miners just become big stakers instead however, with the crypto space so to differentiate considerably come summer as bitcoin will be the only top crypto to remain Proof of Work.
