Ethereum's Ropsten Test is 'Almost' Bug-Free, Two More Testnets to Go Before the Merge

cryptonews.com:

The Ropsten test network (testnet) -- also referred to as Ethereum (ETH)'s first dress rehearsal for the upcoming Merge, when the current Ethereum Mainnet will merge with the beacon chain proof-of-stake (PoS) system -- successfully went through The Merge yesterday.

According to the Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi, the Ropsten testnet hit the selected Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) of 50000000000000000 at around 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, and subsequently, the chain was merged.

The Ropsten testnet hit TTD at ~16:00 UTC (~2h after the planned time, great accuracy for PoW standards!). The chain was at ~99.2% participation rate with healthy proposals and sync committee performance - Pretty much the perfect beacon chain to merge, easy to see what breaks!

Initially, the participation rate, a measure of how many validators are online and performing their duty, dropped by around 13%. However, the developers were quick to find the missing indexes and helped fix the issues.

"After the fixes were in place, we quickly saw the participation and proposal rates go back up towards ~99%," Jayanthi said. "About what we had pre-merge!"

The Ropsten testnet was "almost" bug-free, the developer said, mentioning some remaining issues. One issue was that "some client pairs timeout while building a block and propose with 0 transactions in them," which would affect the throughput of the chain. "We saw this in shadow forks too! Fixes incoming!" he added.

Nevertheless, the developers will be monitoring the chain for the next couple of weeks in order to "make sure no client pairs go out of sync."

And after that, two more testnets are expected to go through merges as well before the main Merge: Goerli and Sepolia. 

Witek Radomski, co-founder