Ethereum developers talk Medalla Testnet! Ethereum developers talk Medalla testnet issues and improvements in the latest ETH 2.0 Dev call held on Aug. 6.
Participation in the testnet is sitting at a stable 80% according to beaconcha.in. Several issues were identified by the team that contributed to the slow start.
Before the launch, client developers discovered several bugs that would have prevented efficient connections between nodes. Developers rushed to fix those bugs just a day or two before the genesis of the testnet. As such, some validates may have failed to update to the latest version.
Launchpad also had several issues where on boarded users would experience issues with UX and education. Teams simply didn’t have the time to prepare the node binaries for this feature.
Curiously, some users were also found to have made multiple 32 ETH deposits, likely with the incorrect belief that these would allow them to have more validates. Contributing to this was MetaMask having issues with opening new popups each time an individual 32 ETH batch occurred.
Stake participation was at 57% during the first hour of the testnet. Part of this, according to the developers, was partially due to Nimbus and Lodestar clients having low participation.
Other delays were simply due to some stakers being offline. This was to be expected, and it’s anticipated that offline validators will be kicked off the network.
Some stakers also didn’t spin up their clients – developers reached out and participation was quickly brought to about 80% thereafter.
This was legitimately expected, as even Prysm and Lighthouse, the two leading clients, are still seeing validation issues. Developers talked about the dominance of the two leading clients and noted that it must be dealt with.
This week, developers are focusing on bug fixing. Research and development continues as Vitalik Buterin published an annoyed specification for Ethereum 2.0 Phase 1.
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