Ethereum (ETH-USD) is another major step closer to transitioning to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work after its first mainnet shadow fork went live on Monday, CoinDesk reported. The shadow fork will "stress test our assumptions around syncing and state growth," Parithosh Jayanthi, an Ethereum Foundation developer, wrote in a tweet April 10, adding that it will also provide "a way to check if our assumptions work on existing testnets and/or mainnet." Note that a testnet is an alternative blockchain used for testing without risk to the primary chain. The shadow fork has already processed 1.16M transactions with an average block time of 14.8 seconds as of Monday, CoinDesk reported, citing a tweet. The move came on the heels of Ether's merge on the Kiln testnet in mid-March. Furthermore, transactions in the energy-efficient PoS model will be validated by nodes, or a computer connected to a crypto network, run by stakers instead of
