At 15:34 UTC (i.e. 11:34 Eastern Time) on Tuesday (August 4), the Ethereum Foundation announced that ETH 2.0’s Medalla testnet had gone live:
Although Medall’s launch had originally been scheduled for 13:00 UTC, initially, the participation rate was only 57% while it had been estimated that it would be at least 80%.
Here is how Hudson Jameson, who is Developer Liason, DevOps Engineer, and Security Engineer at Ethereum Foundation, summarized what he felt about today’s Medella testnet launch:
Thankfully, just 10 minutes later, Ethereum core developer Danny Ryan reported that block finality had been achieved, meaning that the required number of validators were online:
According to Afri Schoedon, who is the Ethereum 2.0 testnet manager, there are five ETH 2.0 clients on Madella:
As for when phase 0 of ETH 2.0 will launch on the mainnet, it depends on whom you ask, but most people in the Ethereum community are hoping/expecting it will happen sometime before the end of the year.
On July 30, Ethereum celebrated its fifth anniversary (since the mainnet went live on 30 July 2015):
