Future Considerations
As this course launches, on September 2021, there have been some interesting developments towards an Eth1-Eth2 merge. We’ll discuss a few of these here. Please note, this may change as it is currently be developed!
First, there is a “mainnet readiness” checklist the Ethereum developers will be using to judge when the time is right for an Eth1-Eth2 merge.
Here’s the rough timeline given by Tim Beiko in August 2021:
There’s also been talk of using rollups as a way to help with the Merge. Essentially, the L2s will function as a sort of shard-like data layer. You can read more about that here.
Rayonism Network
In March 2021, as part of ETHGlobal Scaling hackathon, a group of Ethereum 2.0 developers tried to create a merge testnet. Known as Rayonism, it was meant as a short-term proof of concept project to allow researchers to test certain assumptions being made about the Eth1-Eth2 merge. One of the features it meant to test was the notion of time, a particularly challenging issue with distributed networks, as we discussed earlier in the course.
The Rayonism testnet did run for a short period of time. You can checkout the Merge testnet tutorial they ran here (although it most likely will not work now!)
Additional Materials
- Video: What Happens after ETH1 and ETH2 merge? (Vitalik Buterin)
- Write-up from Merge Workshop in October 2021
- Forum: A Rollup-centric Ethereum Roadmap
- GitHub: Mainnet Readiness Checklist
- GitHub: Eth1 and Eth2 Merge spec
- Rayonism: a research and engineering testnet that combines Eth1-Eth2 Merge and Sharding