To test the terms for withdrawing Ether, Ethereum developers perform a “shadow fork.”
Marius Van Der Wijden, a Go-Ethereum developer, stated in a thread of tweets on January 23 that as the Ethereum Shanghai update date approaches, developers have created a testing environment known as a “shadow fork.” The purpose of the new testnet appears to be to test the requirements for Ether (ETH) staking withdrawals, which aren’t currently functional but will be in the upcoming update.
Withdrawal-Mainnet-Shadow-Fork-1 is finalizing
— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) January 23, 2023
It started out with a few issues because the config wasn't correctly applied on geth (we disallow overriding the mainnet config). The config is applied correctly and all nodes are in agreement. We will start some evil nodes,.
There were at first some problems because Geth’s configuration wasn’t set up properly (we disallow overriding the mainnet config). All nodes concur and the configuration is set up correctly. We’ll deploy some malicious nodes.
A “shadow fork” is a fork of the mainnet that is only intended to be used for testing, according to Alchemy, a company that manages nodes for Web3.
Van Der Wijden claimed that he and another developer by the name of “Potuz” will create malicious nodes that will try to send bad blocks and messages to other nodes on the testnet to get them to join a phony version of the network. Despite the network’s current success, Van Der Wijden stated that he wants to “see if Potuz and I can break it.” This appears to be done to determine whether the upgrade can thwart malicious attacks or whether further changes are necessary before it can be applied to the mainnet.
After developers explained how vital it is to enable the ability to withdraw Ether by staking, this testnet was launched. The proposed EVM Object Format (EOF) was decided not to be a part of the Shanghai upgrade during a meeting on January 6. Making it simpler to later add new features to Ethereum was the aim of EOF. But because it was so complicated, the designers chose not to include it in Shanghai for fear that it would impede the withdrawal procedure.
More than 14.5 million ETH, worth more than $23 billion at the time this report was written, have reportedly been placed into the Ethereum staking contract and cannot yet be removed, according to a report from December 2022 by Nansen. The Ethereum developers came under heavy fire in November 2022 for allegedly moving the goalposts in terms of allowing users to withdraw their money.