Danny Ryan, a core researcher at Ethereum Foundation, has given an account of the sequence of events that lead to the launch of the Spadina testnet, and explained why at least one more “dress rehearsal” will be needed before genesis.
On August 4, Ethereum Foundation announced that ETH 2.0’s Medalla testnet had gone live.
Here is how Hudson Jameson, who is Developer Liason, DevOps Engineer, and Security Engineer at Ethereum Foundation, summarized what he felt about the launch of the Medalla testnet:
Then, on September 14, in a post for the Ethereum Blog, Ryan said that “both the engineers and the community could use one more public testnet launch before mainnet to run through the motions,” and that Spadina would be “a (primarily) mainnet configuration testnet with a 3 day end-of-life (EOL).”
According to Ryan, the main objective of the Spadina testnet was “to give us all another chance to go through one of the more difficult and risky parts of the process – deposits and genesis – before we reach mainnet.”
In a tweetstorm that started around 19:35 UTC on September 29, provided an account of the launch of ETH 2.0’s Spadina testnet.
The Spadina testnet was justified around 19:35 UTC, got finalized around 19:47 UTC, and was launched around 20:01 UTC.
Ryan said that due to the issues that came up in the lead up to the launch, there will be at least one more “dress rehearsal” (i.e. testnet)—the next ETH 2.0 testnet will be named Zinken—before genesis and that even if there is only a low level of participation in Zinken, this will not be considered a failure and that what he is looking for is “a clean client release process and minimal headaches for users.”
Finally, Ryan expects the Zinken testnet to launch in around 10 days from now.
Prysmatic Labs, which has created an Ethereum 2.0 client (written in programming language “Go”) named Prysm, published yesterday an incident report titled “No Finality at Spadina Genesis.”
Here is a summary of their report:
“The new spadina testnet suffered from a lack of finality at launch, with very few Prysm nodes participating, leading to community confusion and a bad look for this ‘genesis rehearsal’. There was no reason why this rehearsal could have failed, and many problems originated from operational faults.”
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