“The Ropsten merger is an important testing milestone on the road to Ethereum’s mainnet merger later this year,” said Preston Van Loon, Ethereum core developer at Prysmatic Labs.
The Ethereum ecosystem is approaching a “huge testing milestone” and the Ropsten testnet merger will happen on June 8th.
According to the Confluence Testnets GitHub page, on Monday, Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathy Jayanathy submitted a pull request for the Ropsten testnet Confluence configuration code, assuming the implementation is ready to go.
Ropsten is one of several testnets created by the Ethereum Foundation in 2017 and currently maintained by the Geth development team.
This particular testnet is considered to be the best replication of the main Ethereum network as it follows a similar network structure. This allows developers to realistically test the deployment before making updates to the live network.
The Ropsten Merge testnet will include a Proof-of-Work (PoW) network in conjunction with a new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus layer testnet, scheduled to begin on May 30th. What happens after the actual fusion is modeled. between Ethereum and Beacon Chain is finally taking place and becoming a PoS network.
Developers in the community post their bullish testnet news online. Preston Van Loon, Ethereum Core Developer at Prysmatic Labs said:
“Ropsten Testnet will be merged on June 8th! The Ropsten merger is a key testing milestone on the road to Ethereum’s mainnet merger later this year.”
Another core developer, known as trent_vanepps on Twitter, said last week ahead of Ropsten’s June 8 confirmation that the Sepolia and Georli testnets could also be set up for fusion attempts.
Notably, the testnet schedule aligns with comments from Ethereum developer Tim Beiko, who said last month that the merger would not be ready to go live until “a few months after June.”
“There is no exact date yet, but we are definitely in the final chapter of PoW on Ethereum,” he said.
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Another strong indicator that things are moving in the right direction is the Ethereum Foundation’s announcement earlier this week that it had “merged” its main PoW network and consensus-level PoS error reward programs into one.
Overall, the maximum reward is now $250,000 for reporting bugs on Ethereum. However, the amount can also be doubled at important times, such as when updating the public testnets, which are also set for the mainnet.
“Overall, this represents a 10x increase over the previous maximum payout for Consensus Level Rewards and a 20x increase over the previous maximum payout for Execution Level Rewards,” reads the announcement.
