Kiln Testnet Launch: Join #TestingTheMerge on Ethereum!

Summary

• Kiln is live, explore it here
• #TestingTheMerge is actively ongoing. Get involved!

Kiln is live, explore it here

A week ago, the Kiln testnet successfully transitioned to the Merge, changing from a PoW testnet to a fully operational PoS testnet.

If you manage validators on Mainnet, now is the moment to test your post-merge configurations. Head over to the Kiln landing page and get started.

It’s the right time.

#TestingTheMerge is actively ongoing. Get involved!

The shift from PoW to PoS on Kiln encountered some challenges. An encoding error resulted in Prysm producing invalid blocks, while some of the execution clients faced synchronization issues during the transition.

While clients are now feature-complete and approaching production-readiness, minor software bugs are still emerging. These are not critical to the core specifications and research but highlight a point we’ve emphasized for some time — security and testing will significantly influence the final Merge release date.

To address this, client teams, security experts, and testers are intensifying their testing efforts over the next 4+ weeks in preparation for updating the public testnets. These initiatives include hive testing, Kurtosis testnet builds, Antithesis coverage-guided network fuzzing, shadow-forking Goerli and Mainnet, manual code reviews, comprehensive fuzzing, enhancing consensus tests, and more!

On the fuzzing front, we’d like to extend our gratitude to Blockdaemon for donating $900k in IBM Cloud credits to support the Merge testing initiative! Fuzzing is about applying more resources to the challenge than your competitors, and with these contributions, we are optimistic about identifying all potential bugs. Thank you

Join us!

The #TestingTheMerge initiative is in full swing. Whether it’s running a validator on Kiln, testing your developer setup, crafting a tutorial, enhancing documentation, or creating a unique fuzzer, everycontributionmatters!

This is the most significant blockchain upgrade ever. No doubt. So contribute to its success — join us in the Eth R&D Discord in the Merge #testing channel