Ethereum largely passes first major test for proof of stake
Up until now developers had largely been testing out the big change on testnets, which are dedicated clones of the Ethereum blockchain designed for testing purposes. What was different yesterday was they carried out a test on a version of the actual mainnet, in order to try to see if the code worked on the real blockchain.
Since the developers did not want to actually carry out the change in full, they created what’s called a “shadow fork” to test it. This is an experimental exercise where some of the validator nodes split off from the main network and made the upgrade on their own. It did not affect the rest of the network.
