The latest Ethereum 2.0 Altona testnet will be launched on June 29

Ethereum 2.0 developers agreed in a conference call to move the launch of the milestone 0.12 testnet to Monday to ensure all engineers are ready for the genesis block.

By Andrew Shevchenko

Translated by: Zion Editor: Rose

The latest Ethereum 2.0 testnet iteration, Altona, is scheduled to be released on Monday, June 29.

As discussed during the June 25 Ethereum 2.0 developer call, the new testnet is “mostly ready,” only being delayed to ensure all developers are present during the launch.

Afri Schoedon, a developer who coordinated all previous testnet launches, explained that a minimum number of deposits must be reached to launch Altona.

Schoedon said irregularities in some deposits created “a technical genesis event.” Still, developers agreed to delay the genesis block to avoid a weekend when fewer developers were present to fix any potential issues.

The developers then agreed to coordinate outside of the call to set a specific time for Monday to generate the genesis block.

Close to final version

Altona is the first testnet to use the latest Ethereum 2.0 0.12 specification. Developers plan to use this as a basis to provide the first long-lived Ethereum 2.0 testnet for the public.

Developers still refer to Altona as the “devnet” because it is primarily used to iron out the worst bugs. Previous networks often had fundamental problems with synchronization, even leading to chain forks.

But the team hopes that the new specification will be stable enough to eventually be opened up for true public testnets, similar to the various parallel networks in ethereum 1.0, such as Goerli and Rinkeby.

Development is ongoing, with the 0.12 testnet expected to launch in June.

So far, there has been no sign of a Phase 0 mainnet launch, the long-awaited phase that will introduce staking on the Ethereum chain. But the Altona testnet could be an important step toward achieving that goal.