Nethermind’s Twitter post stated: “Transition in Mainnet-Shadowfork-13 (the last shadowfork before The Merge) was successful for all Nethermind nodes!”

With the much-anticipated Merge almost here, Ethereum’s developers have been performing a series of tests to ensure the successful migration Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which will be happening sometime next week. 

Ethereum has finally completed what seems to be its final network test before the historic upgrade.

In a tweet by its research and engineering company, Nethermind,

“Transition in Mainnet-Shadowfork-13 (the last shadowfork before The Merge) was successful for all Nethermind nodes!”

They announced the last testnet, the Ethereum mainnet’s 13th shadow fork, has successfully gone live without any hitch. These shadow forks help the developers test synchronization to ensure network safety during the permanent upgrades.

Therefore, this successful launching of Mainnet-Shadowfork-13 means Ethereum is finally prepared to transition into the PoS consensus mechanism.

This success comes after their last week's hiccups with Bellatrix, a key pre-merge upgrade. The Bellatrix upgrade met some obstacles when its missed block rate rose by 1700%.

The missed block rate metric measures the failure frequency of Ethereum’s network to verify a block of transactions for validation. The failure rate is usually about 0.5%, but with the Bellatrix upgrade, the figure skyrocketed to 9%.

Ethereum’s developers attributed this failure to the lack of readiness from some node operators yet to update their clients to the merge-ready software. These node operators are individuals and organizations that maintain the backed infrastructure of Ethereum network operation.

During the Bellatrix upgrade, about 25.2% of Ethereum’s nodes were yet to upgrade their software.

But with the last upgrade, the Mainnet-Shadowfork-13 tested this missed block rate issue, and there was no glitch. Hence, Ethereum is prepared for its launch into the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol.

The developers have assured everyone that the Merge will go according to plans. However, they will continue with the test runs to ensure everything is in check until the day of the upgrade.

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