Ethereum Sepolia testnet has completed merge testing

According to news on the evening of July 6th Beijing time, the Ethereum Sepolia test network has completed the merger.

This is one of the test tasks before the merger of Ethereum mainnet. Sepolia testnet is a testnet running the Ethash algorithm of PoW, and the EVM version it uses is the upgraded version of London.

Before the merger was executed, the Sepolia testnet launched the Bepolia permissioned beacon chain first, and approved parties can become Bepolia operation validators. The launch of the Bepolia permissioned beacon chain also directly marks the end of the permissionless proof-of-work phase. The Bepolia testnet will be launched on June 20. It is forked from Altair, the current upgraded version of the beacon chain.

In this way, the Sepolia testnet represents the upgraded Ethereum mainnet in London, while the Bepolia permissioned beacon chain represents the currently running Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain.

Sepolia appears to already be the main testbed for Ethereum 2.0.

Let’s take a closer look at the data from the two networks.

According to Sepolia etherscan, the testnet entered the merge at block height 1450408, at 1:58:01 UTC on July 6, or 9:58 pm Beijing time on July 6. After the merge, the block rewards originally distributed to miners were -2, and the miners' block rewards were 0. The block difficulty has not been adjusted instantly at this time, and the block difficulty remains at 161842208697.

Therefore, in the next block 1450409, the block time increases from 7 seconds to 35 seconds, and the difficulty of the next block has become 0 (the difficulty of block production is also calculated through block production).

After the merger, the execution gas fee was obtained by the nodes involved in downloading and executing the client, that is, the Sepolia test network node. Therefore, in the next block 1450410, because there were 6 transfer transactions and 1 internal contract call, the block-producing node obtained a gas fee of 0.07ETH.

When the network is not congested, the gas price unit of the test network has been maintained at 7wei, and the gas price is extremely low.