Polygon Down & Ethereum's Final PoS Testnet Launching

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It really makes me sad to see that the Polygon blockchain has basically been halted for 12 hours now. That's no bueno. On the bright side, though... Ethereum is about to get a major upgrade.

Polygon is Down

If you've never heard of the Polygon blockchain, it was created as a layer 2 solution for Ethereum. The advantages of using Polygon are insanely low gas fees, super fast transactions, and it's more eco-friendly (for now). This comes with some challenges though as it has experiences outages and sever congestion at times. The chain has been halted for around 12 hours at this point, which doesn't instill a lot of confidence or trust within its users. According to the official announcement, the Polygon dev team is actively working to resolve the issue, but we don't really have any idea when it will be fixed. I don't fully understand the issue and obviously they don't either. It's a problem with one of the 2 nodes that run the Proof of Stake protocol. This is how transactions and blocks are validated, so without being functional, the chain is useless.

Supposedly a hotfix has been deployed, but it still isn't working for me. No blocks are being created. No transactions are processing. Their "hotfix" hasn't restored any function at this point. It's going to be a long night/day for the devs. They have stated that funds are safe, so I really hope that's the case. Everything should be back online soon and transactions will probably be backlogged. Don't expect to jump right into trading.

Ethereum Kiln Testnet

Meanwhile, on the Ethereum blockchain (layer 1), we have the Kiln testnet launching in about 8 hours. Ethereum is currently a Proof of Work consensus chain, meaning blocks are created and transactions are validated via mining. It has been the goal from the beginning to eventually migrate to Proof of Stake, and that is finally coming to reality. I tested out the Kintsugi testnet no too long ago, and it was awesome. Ethereum is finally going to be what it was always intended to be. Fast and secure. Also way more environmentally friendly. Hopefully gas fees will come down too. Nevertheless, very exciting times because I've personally been hearing about Ethereum 2.0 since like 2017.

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If you wanna test the Kiln testnet, feel free to do so. It'll be live tomorrow morning. Not sure exactly when, but it's definitely history in the making. This "should be" the last Proof of Stake testnet before they completely kill Proof of Work testnets like Rinkeby and Ropsten. The merge is coming and I think it's coming this year. The merge is when the Ethereum chain and the new consensus layer merge into the new version of Ethereum. They used to call it ETH 2.0 but now it's just Ethereum. How ironic is it that the Polygon chain has grinded to a screeching halt only hours before the launch of the final Ethereum PoS testnet? I honestly couldn't have thought of a better time. The reason I find this ironic is my theory that Polygon and other layer 2 solutions will be a lot less relevant when Ethereum's merge happens. I'm not saying these chains will die, but a lot of the reason they exist were due to Ethereum's limitations.