What happened?
Yesterday morning, Ethereum’s Goerli test network successfully completed its sixth shadow fork, the final shadow fork test before the official Prater/Goerli Merge tentatively scheduled next week.
The Goerli Shadow Fork 6 merge allowed the Flashbots team to test mev-boost infrastructure in a simulated production environment.
9,100 Goerli validators registered with the Flashots relay and connected to it through the simulated merge. As the merge happened, these validators were able to successfully source blocks from the Flashbots relay. All systems worked flawlessly. 🎉
Flashbots has participated in previous shadow forks, but this was the first time that proposers were already connected to our relay during the merge itself instead of afterward.
What does this mean?
This was not yet a complete load test as the real Ethereum Merge is expected to have 200-400k validators using mev-boost.
However, this functionality test gives us increased confidence that
- our systems run stable through the merge
- can handle a reasonable amount of load without any issues
- we know how to configure and monitor all the components and systems
- we can figure out causes and solutions to any issues that may arise
- we can run the setup through Ethereum’s mainnet Merge projected to occur on September 19.
Running a relay under load is hard, and the challenges of it generally go unappreciated by the public. The Flashbots team wants to share these wins with the community as they arise!