Zhejiang Public Testnet is Finalizing

Zhejiang Public Testnet is now live! Zhejiang is an eastern coastal province in China. This is the first Shanghai-Capella (Shapella) public testnet. It is meant to invite community to test how Staked ETH Withdrawal process will look like after the mainnet upgrade.

Timeline
Expected Protocol Changes
Insights

At the time of the mainnet upgrade, the blockchain will have to go through a fork on both Execution Layer and Consensus Layer simultaneously. This fork will be called Shanghai for the EL clients and Capella for the CL side. So these two events will be triggered simultaneously. And this is achieved by EL forking at a specific time rather than at a block number and CL forking at a specific epoch.

Zhejiang Testnet has seen around 27,000 transactions with an average block time of 12.8 seconds.

Timeline

1st Feb 15:00 UTC: Zhejiang Public Testnet Launched
7th Feb: Shapella upgrade will be triggered simultaneously on both the EL and the CL 6 days later at epoch 1350.

Once the upgrade has been triggered, all the changes with proposed EIPs will be enabled on Execution Layer and users can test partial and complete withdrawals of ETH staking rewards.

Expected Protocol Changes

It aims to test all the Shanghai EIPs:

Also, it is testing BLS to Execution changes at scale and Timestamp based forking.

Users can also attempt to convert 0x00 credentials to 0x01 and set a withdrawal address.

Users can request funds in different faucets, generate keys with wagyu, deposit with launchpad, and monitor it with beacon chain.

61,000 validators stake around 1,950,000 TestETH.

There are three faucet options available to get test ETH:

zhejiang FaucETH
Zhejiang PoW Faucet
Request on EthStaker Discord

Client Readiness

Currently, Zhejiang Testnet works fine with all client combinations.

Some Developers have experienced an issue in the Lighthouse client. There are pre-genesis inconsistencies between endpoints.

The expected behavior is that either both should not return the headers and a genesis endpoint should be created for this, or both should return slot 0 even before genesis has occurred as genesis is known beforehand.

Some Bad Blocks are also seen in Prysm-Besu Client Combinations.