Ethereum Shadow Fork 10 Goes Live

• Ethereum successfully undergoes Shadow Fork #10.

• Aave’s $GHO proposal is now live on Snapshot.

• Rocket Pool is set to release Smart Node v1.5.0.

• StarkGate integrates support for Orbiter Finance.

The tenth shadow fork for Ethereum Mainnet went live today without any client issues. A shadow fork is when the state of an existing network is mirrored onto a merged testnet. It allows developers to test different merge scenarios. This comes amid the upcoming merge of the Goerli Testnet. Prater, the beacon chain testnet for Goerli, will run through the Bellatrix upgrade on August 4th. Goerli is then expected to hit TTD 10,790,000 between August 6th and 12th. Geth v1.10.21 was released today, configuring the merge TTD on the Goerli testnet. Goerli marks the final testnet to be merged before The Merge on Ethereum Mainnet.

Rocket Pool released a guide for Redstone, a Rocket Pool upgrade that includes compatibility for The Merge. Rocket Pool Node Operators should prepare their nodes for Smart Node v1.5.0, which will be released later this week. On August 15th, Oracle DAO will vote on the smart contract upgrade proposal. The Rocket Pool Core Team will then apply the smart contract upgrade on around August 29th. Rocket Pool will then release a subsequent smart node merge-compatible version as soon as the Ethereum client teams publish the official Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) for The Merge. The Merge on Ethereum Mainnet is currently targeted for September 19th.

A preliminary proposal for the Aave $GHO stablecoin is now live for voting on Snapshot. If approved, the Ethereum V2 Market on the Aave Protocol will be assigned as the first facilitator for the USD-pegged $GHO stablecoin. It will allow anyone to use various assets as collateral mint $GHO. 100% of the interest payments from $GHO loans will go directly to the AaveDAO. Users will still earn interest on the underlying supplied collateral. The borrowed $GHO is burned once a user fully repays a position. Aave governance has until July 31st to vote on the preliminary proposal.

Mercedes Benz is now among the growing list of companies to use Polygon PoS. Daimler South East Asia, part of the Mercedes Benz Group, is now in production with its Acentrik blockchain. Acentrik is a decentralized data marketplace that allows enterprises to buy and sell data. Private data can also be sold for its use in calculating results without revealing the underlying data. Acentrik executes transactions on Polygon. Users can pay for data with a stablecoin, but will still need MATIC to pay for gas fees. The data itself is stored off-chain on IPFS or AWS S3. An NFT represents each dataset with a metadata hash stored with it.

StarkGate, the native gateway for StarkNet, has integrated Orbiter Finance into its bridge. Users can bridge ETH from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon to StarkNet via Orbiter. Users can also use Banxa and Layerswap gateways to transfer ETH onto StarkNet. There is still a limit on how much ETH can be bridged with capacity increasing by 30 ETH each week. There is currently 540 ETH in the StarkNet Alpha deposit contract. StarkNet is still in an alpha phase and will undergo a regenesis before its final production release planned for Q4 2022.