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On March 29, 2019, Raul Jordan, an Ethereum 2.0 co-lead at Prysmatic Labs, announced that Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 Testnet would be released soon. The announcement, made through a blog post titled ‘Ethereum 2.o Serenity Testnet update – Closer than Ever,’ represents the second stage of Prysmatic Labs’ roadmap, the Sapphire, the developer said.
The blog post read,
“Our plan is to release a public, single-client testnet for Phase 0 of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap. We are currently targeting the v0.4 release of the official specification […]”
It further stated the main agenda of this testnet was to ensure that there was a network that was resilient to forks and validator inactivity, while also enabling new validators who want to participate in the PoS consensus to join the network, in accordance to its rules.
Phase 0 Testnet also instructs Ethereum coin holders on how to stake and deposit their coins to become validators of Ethereum 2.0. Additionally, the team will deploy “Validator Deposit Contract” on Goerli Testnet, the new Testnet of Ethereum, for the same.
The blog further stated,
“Users can deposit 3.2 Goerli testnet ETH into this contract with their Ethereum 2.0 private key credentials, run a Prysm node, and then be queued into becoming an active, proof-of-stake validator in the network. Deposits are one-way, that is, the test ETH cannot be sent back to the Ethereum 1.0 Goerli testnet chain.”
The blog post also stated that each validator would be rewarded or penalized based on their behavior on the network, adding that the protocol “favors liveness”. This entails that the “chain can continue” even if a large portion of validators is offline. However, this would lead to the funds of these offline validators being penalized, thereby resulting in capital loss.
Purpose of the Testnet | Source: Prysmatic Labs
Raul Jordan added,
“Our testnet will be a gradually evolving project that we hope the community uses as an opportunity to test how Ethereum 2.0’s beacon chain fares in practice out in the wild. We will include a monitoring portal for our cloud cluster anyone can see to inspect the health of the network […]”