As the proposed Ethereum Shanghai upgrade date approaches, developers have created a test environment called a “shadow fork,” according to a Jan. 23 tweet thread from Go-Ethereum developer Marius Van Der. Wijden. The new testnet appears to have been created to test the conditions necessary for Ether (ETH) staking withdrawals, which are currently disabled but are intended to be enabled in the update.
Retirement-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1 is ending
It started with some issues because the config was not applied correctly in geth (we don’t allow overriding the mainnet config). The settings are applied correctly and all nodes agree. We will start some evil nodes.
— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) January 23, 2023
The name of the testnet is “Retirement-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1”. According to Web3 node provider Alchemy, a “shadow fork” is a fork of the mainnet that is intended to be used for testing purposes only.
Van Der Wijden stated that he and another developer named “Potuz” will create malicious nodes that will send bad blocks and messages to other nodes on the testnet and try to convince them to join a fake version of the network. For now, the network is running smoothly, but Van Der Wijden has stated that he wants to “see if Potuz and I can break it.” This is apparently being done to see if the update can prevent malicious attacks or if more changes need to be made before it is rolled out to the mainnet.
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The launch of this testnet comes after developers expressed an increasing urgency to make Ether staking withdrawals a reality. On January 6, they held a meeting during which agreed to exclude the proposed EVM Object Format (EOF) from the Shanghai update. EOF was intended to make Ethereum easier to upgrade in the future. But due to its complexity, the developers decided to keep it out of Shanghai for fear that it would delay the implementation of the retirement.
Over 14.5 million ETH has been invested (over $23 billion at the time of writing). deposited in the Ethereum participation contract and currently cannot be withdrawn, according to a December 2022 report from Nansen. In November 2022, the Ethereum developers came under heavy criticism for allegedly changing course on allowing withdrawals.
Currently, the Shanghai update is scheduled to roll out sometime in March.
