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Ethereum's Sepolia Testnet Successfully Switches to Proof-of-Stake
The Sepolia proof-of-work chain merged with its proof-of-stake chain on Wednesday, taking Ethereum one step closer to its own Merge moment.
Updated Apr 9, 2024, 11:11 p.m. Published Jul 6, 2022, 5:24 p.m.
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The penultimate test environment network (testnet) merge before the Ethereum blockchain makes its long-awaited move to proof-of-stake from proof-of-work has successfully been completed.
- Sepolia was the second of three public testnets to run through the Merge. After this, Goerli is expected to merge.
- The network went to proof-of-stake (PoS) when the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) exceeded 17,000,000,000,000,000. That occurred around 17:00 UTC.
- In the hours since the testnet merge happened, no significant glitches have been reported.
- The Sepolia merge was a two-step process. Ethereum announced that first the operators needed to update their consensus layer and execution layer clients together. That then activated two phases: the first at an epoch height on the Beacon Chain and the second upon hitting the total difficulty value on the execution layer.
- The testnet merge takes the project one step closer to Ethereum's mainnet upgrade later this year. The first testnet merge, Ropsten, was completed on June 8.
Read more: Merge Testing on Ethereum: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
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