Finalized no. 34 | Ethereum Foundation Blog

tl;dr

• Kiln🧱🔥 is up, check it out
• #TestingTheMerge is in full swing. Do your part, get involved!

Kiln🧱🔥 is up, check it out

One week ago, the Kiln🧱🔥 testnet went through the Merge transition to evolve from a PoW testnet to a fully functional PoS testnet.

If you run validators on Mainnet, now is the time to test your post-merge setups. Jump into the Kiln landing page and dig in.

Seriously. It’s time.

#TestingTheMerge is in full swing. Get involved!

The transition from PoW to PoS on Kiln was not without issue. Due to an encoding error, Prysm was producing invalid blocks, while some of the execution clients had other errors related to sync during the transition.

Although clients are now feature complete and nearing production-readiness, minor software bugs are still popping up here and there. While these are not fundamental issues with the core specifications and research, this points to something we’ve been saying for quite a long time — security and testing will be the long tail defining the ultimate Merge release date.

To this end, client teams, security researchers, and testers are doubling down on testing on all fronts for the next 4+ weeks in preparation for upgrading the public testnets. These efforts include hive testing, Kurtosis testnet builds, Antithesis coverage guided network fuzzing, shadow-forking Goerli and Mainnet, manual code review, fuzzing across the stack, enhancing consensus tests, and more!

On the fuzzing front, we want to give a huge shout-out to Blockdaemon for providing the Merge testing effort with $900k in IBM Cloud credits! Fuzzing is all about throwing more resources at the problem than your adversary, so with these credits we’re confident that we can shake out all the bugs there are to find. Thank you 🙏

Get involved!

The #TestingTheMerge effort is in full force. Whether it be running a validator on Kiln, testing your developer workflow, writing a tutorial, improving documentation, or creating a new exotic fuzzer, every👏last👏bit👏counts👏!

This is the largest blockchain upgrade ever. Period. So do your part to make it a success — join us in the Eth R&D Discord in the Merge #testing channel 🚀