The Road to Altair Edition 🛣⭐️
tl;dr
Pyrmont forks, tests in progress
After a series of small but very valuable Altair devnets, Pyrmont – a large public testnet – was upgraded last week. The transition to Altair went smoothly, paving the way for the next wave of testing and upgrades.
This week Pyrmont is put to the test as we host a number of test scenarios on the soon to be obsolete testnet. Don’t panic! At the time of writing this article, Pyrmont already has 482 finalityless epochs with a significant portion of validators taken offline for a few days. Such testing helps eliminate hard cases in consensus code and highlight customer issues in load management in exceptional scenarios.
Then practice
With the Pyrmont upgrade, Prater – a larger, longer-term test network – is next. Customer teams have agreed on an upgrade date of September 2 (12:00 UTC). View the complete Altair Prater network configuration here.
Keep your eyes peeled for client builds that include the Prater fork setup. These should drop over the next week and allow you to upgrade your testnet nodes in preparation for next Thursday’s fork.
After the Prater upgrade, it’s a great time to perform various operations on the network: exit a validator, get slashed — have fun!
When will the Altair mainnet be released?
While there is still a lot to do between now and then, the Altair mainnet fork is just around the corner. Assuming a relatively uneventful test of Pyrmont and a successful upgrade of Prater, customer teams are targeting an Altair mainnet launch in late September 🚀
