Ethereum 2.0 almost ready after a successful Zinken trial

October 13, 2020
By Sam Grant

The anticipated Ethereum 2.0 project is nearing completion after a recently launched Zinken testnet worked smoothly

The Ethereum team launched the Zinken testnet on October 12, and according to the developers involved, it has been “performing perfectly”. The previous testnet (Spadina) was used to give client teams a chance to fix any glitches in their release process. It also gave validators a chance to experience a genesis ahead of the mainnet.

According to a blog post, the project’s lead developer Danny Ryan, said that Zinken was concerned with getting the genesis process right. Terence Tsao, also a developer, commented on the results of the testnet via a tweet saying, “Almost perfect performance on an incentivized testnet that ran by the community”.

This is good news for the Ethereum blockchain considering the Spadina testnet trial was unsuccessful. The Zinken testnet is the last scheduled run-through for testing Eth2 genesis (creation of the first block). The next step would be to take the proof-of-stake network live.

The new Ethereum 2.0 network requires over 16,000 validators, and 500,000 ETH deposited for it to work. Of course, these figures were lowered to make it possible to carry out the trials. Spadina failed to launch as expected at the end of last month because of client errors and low user participation.

The Zinken testnet, alongside the Medalla testnet, represents the Ethereum community’s efforts towards realising Ethereum 2.0. The new network will improve the transaction rate from 15 to 100,000 transactions per second. In turn, this will make the Ethereum network more responsive.

Data collected on September 28 showed that the Medalla testnet had garnered 60,000 validators and about two million in test ETH. According to Ryan, these numbers have since increased, as 15,000 more validators joined, taking the number of test ETH to 2.4 million.

“Genesis went well, which is the main thing we were looking for,” explained Ryan. Although it has already achieved its goal, Zinken will remain active for the next couple of days.