*Disclaimer: None of this is meant as a slight against any client in particular. There is a high likelihood that each client and possibly even the specification has its own oversights and bugs. Eth2 is a complicated protocol, and the people implementing it are only human. The point of this article is to highlight how and why the risks are mitigated.*

With the launch of the Medalla testnet, people were encouraged to experiment with different clients. And right from genesis, we saw why: Nimbus and Lodestar nodes were unable to cope with the workload of a full testnet and got stuck. [0][1] As a result, Medalla failed to finalise for the first half hour of its existence.

On the 14th of August, Prysm nodes lost track of time when one of the time servers they were using as a reference suddenly jumped one day into the future. These nodes then started making blocks and attestations as though they were also in the future. When the clocks on these nodes were corrected (either by updating the client, or because the timeserver returned to the correct time), those that had disabled the default slashing protection found their stakes slashed.

Exactly what happened is a bit more subtle, I highly recommend reading Raul Jordan’s write-up of the incident.

Clock Failure – The enworsening

The moment when Prysm nodes started time traveling, they made up ~62% of the network. This meant that the threshold for finalising blocks (>2/3 on one chain) could not be met. Worse still, these nodes couldn’t find the chain that they were expecting (there was a 4 hour “gap” in the history and they all jumped ahead to slightly different times) and so they flooded the network with short forks as they guessed at the “missing” data.

Prysm currently makes up 82% of Medalla nodes ! [ethernodes.org]

At this point, the network was flooded with thousands of different guesses at what the head of the chain was and all the clients started to buckle under the increased workload of figuring out which chain was the right one. This led to nodes falling behind, needing to sync, running out of memory, and other forms of chaos, all of which worsened the problem.

Ultimately this was a good thing, as it allowed us to not only fix the root problem relating to clocks, but to stress test the clients under condition of mass node failure and network load. That said, this failure need not have been so extreme, and the culprit in this case was Prysm’s dominance.

Shilling Decentralisation – Part I, it’s good for eth2

As I’ve discussed previously, 1/3 is the magic number when it comes to safe, asynchronous BFT algorithms. If more than 1/3 of validators are offline, epochs can no longer be finalised. So while the chain still grows, it is no longer possible to point to a block and guarantee that it will remain a part of the canonical chain.

Shilling Decentralisation – Part II, it’s good for you

To the maximum possible extent, validators are incentived to do what is good for the network and not simply trusted to do something because it is the right thing to do.

If more than 1/3 of nodes are offline, then penalties for the offline nodes start ramping up. This is called the inactivity penalty.

This means that, as a validator, you want to try to ensure that if something is going to take your node offline, it is unlikely to take many other nodes offline at the same time.

The same goes for being slashed. While, there’s always a chance that your validators are slashed due to a spec or software mistake/bug, the penalties for single slashings are “only” 1 ETH.

However, if many validators are slashed at the same time as you, then penalties go up to as high as 32 ETH. The point at which this happens is again the magic 1/3 threshold. [An explanation of why this is the case can be found here].

These incentives are called liveness anti-correlation and safety anti-correlation respectively, and are very intentional aspects of eth2’s design. Anti-correlation mechanisms incentivise validators to make decisions that are in the best interest of the network, by tying individual penalties to how much each validator is impacting the network.

Shilling Decentralisation – Part III, the numbers

Eth2 is being implemented by many independent teams, each developing independent clients according to the specification written primarily by the eth2 research team. This ensures that there are multiple beacon node & validator client implementations, each making different decisions about the technology, languages, optimisations, trade-offs etc required to build an eth2 client. This way, a bug in any layer of the system will only impact those running a specific client, and not the whole network.

If, in the example of the Prysm Medalla time-bug, only 20% of eth2 nodes were running Prysm and 85% of people were online, then the inactivity penalty wouldn’t have kicked in for Prysm nodes and the problem could have been fixed with only minor penalties and some sleepless nights for the devs.

In contrast, because so many people were running the same client (many of whom had disabled slashing protection), somewhere between 3500 and 5000 validators were slashed in a short period of time.* The high degree of correlation means that slashings were ~16 ETH for these validators because they were using a popular client.

* At the time of writing, slashings are still pouring in, so there is no final number yet.

Try something new

Now is the time to experiment with different clients. Find a client that a minority of validators are using, (you can look at the distribution here). Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, and Prysm are all reasonably stable at the moment while Lodestar is catching up fast.

Most importantly, TRY A NEW CLIENT! We have an opportunity to create a more healthy distribution on Medalla in preparation for a decentralised mainnet.

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Sebastien Guillemot, co-founder of Paima Studios and dcSpark, jolted the Cardano developer community on X this afternoon with a terse progress report: “We’re up to 3 full-time developers working on Starstream (on top of myself)… We’re accelerating development to bring it to mainnet faster given all the interest.”

The message, though only two sentences long, signals a meaningful resource shift inside the still-nascent Starstream working group and suggests that Cardano’s first zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) may appear on mainnet sooner than previously expected. No target block height or hard launch window has been released, but the acceleration comes barely five weeks after founder Charles Hoskinson publicly supported the working group, calling the project “a core component of Cardano’s future.”

Why Starstream Matters For Cardano

Starstream matters because it tackles the single most common criticism of Cardano’s extended-UTXO ledger: the difficulty of building stateful, privacy-preserving applications without fracturing logic across dozens of validator scripts. In Cardano’s eUTXO model every piece of contract state lives inside its own unspent output, a design that grants parallelism and determinism but complicates long-running workflows and advanced cryptography.

Research groups inside IOG have explored adding recursive SNARKs to Plutus, yet a production implementation has remained elusive. Starstream’s answer is to step outside Plutus entirely and embed a coroutine-oriented zkVM that compiles to WebAssembly, executes off-chain, and seals each state transition inside a succinct proof verified on-chain by a lightweight Plutus wrapper.

“Starstream is a chain-agnostic, UTXO-based, zero-knowledge virtual machine that re-imagines smart-contract execution using coroutines as its foundational primitive,” notes the original technical overview published on Cardano Explorer in late April.

Coroutines give developers something they have never had: a single, linear program that can pause mid-execution, emit a UTXO that holds both data and the exact byte-code position, and later resume when a new transaction spends that output. A yield point in Starstream therefore becomes a cryptographically secured checkpoint; when the program wakes up, it needs only prove—rather than re-execute—the suspended segment.

The result is a state machine that preserves UTXO determinism while natively supporting multi-step workflows such as auctions, lending loops or on-chain games, all without shared-state contention.

Notably, Cardano has historically proceeded through carefully staged hard-fork combinator events by Hoskinson-led Input Output (IOG); Starstream, by contrast, is being built as an opt-in execution layer that can be grafted onto Cardano without a network-wide fork, making its path to mainnet limited chiefly by audit, peer review and tooling.

At press time, ADA traded at $0.684.

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A widely followed crypto analyst believes that Bitcoin (BTC) will print new all-time highs once there’s more clarity around two key issues.

In a new thread, crypto trader Michaël van de Poppe tells his 783,300 followers on the social media platform X that Bitcoin will likely break out once US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies and the Fed’s rate cut plans are clearer.

“Bitcoin is still stuck in a range, which it has been acting in for basically two months. The longer something stays within a narrow range, the heavier the impulse will be once it breaks out of it. I assume that we’ll see light at the end of the tunnel with the FED/tariffs and that Bitcoin will fast rally towards new all-time highs in this quarter.”

The analyst also predicts that Bitcoin will outperform gold over the next year.

“Quite frankly, if you’d ask me to choose between BTC or gold for the next 12 months, I’d almost always take Bitcoin as I assume that will be, percent-wise, substantially higher than gold. If you put it wider, if I had another $1,000 available, I’d rather want to put it in ETH.”

The analyst says that Bitcoin’s bull run will likely catch many off guard as worries about a recession mount.

“It’s the final shakeout where a big majority believes we’re in a recession and early-peak top for Bitcoin. And then the big run comes.”

Bitcoin is trading for $84,576 at time of writing, flat on the day.

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Here’s Who Attentending Trump’s Crypto Summit

She attributed this to the roundtable format and the participation of the Presidential Working Group on Digital Assets, which reportedly includes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the SEC Chair, and the CFTC Chair, Crypto Czar David Sacks and Bo Hines, Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets of the White House.

“A larger, invite-only reception is being planned across the street from the White House for those not invited to the roundtable meeting,” she added. Terrett also provided a series of updates, confirming multiple attendees.

Among them are Michael Saylor, Bitcoin Inc CEO David Bailey, Paradigm founder Matt Huang, Exodus CEO JP Richardson, Multicoin Capital co-founder Kyle Samani, and Zach Witkoff of World Liberty Finance. Additional confirmations include Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, and Kraken CEO Arjun Sethi.

Terrett also noted: “A little more detail here — invites were sent to attendees via email this afternoon. Per the email, the event is scheduled to go from 1:30PM – 5:30PM. No further details in the missive beyond time and location.”

Several of the confirmed attendees have already spoken publicly about the summit. Michael Saylor posted on X: “I have been invited to the Digital Assets Summit at the White House this Friday, hosted by the President.”

Multicoin’s Kyle Samani wrote: “I’ll be attending The Digital Assets Summit on Friday, March 7th at the White House. I look forward to collaborating with industry peers, the Trump administration, and elected officials to ensure crypto thrives in America. Thank you to President Trump for this wonderful opportunity!”

Paradigm founder Matt Huang expressed enthusiasm: “I’ll be attending the White House Digital Asset Summit on Friday. Thank you to President Trump for the invitation. I look forward to discussing how America can take a leadership role in promoting the principles of open crypto and enabling builders in ecosystems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.”

Notably absent from the list of confirmed attendees is Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. Earlier in the week, Garlinghouse wrote on X: “I’ve said this before – the crypto industry will achieve our goals (and beyond), IF WE WORK TOGETHER. Appreciate the crypto President Donald Trump’s vision of a govt digital asset reserve representative of the industry. […] I will certainly continue to champion this while in Washington at the end of this week.”

So far, however, Garlinghouse has not confirmed whether he received an invitation to Friday’s summit. Similarly, no confirmation has emerged regarding representatives from the Solana or Cardano ecosystems, despite President Trump’s recent Truth Social announcement of establishing a crypto strategic reserve holding five cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana, and Cardano. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko have also remained silent on any attendance.

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $87,033.

In the world of blockchain and digital assets, testing is essential. Magic Eden’s new TestME token plays a crucial role in developing secure wallet infrastructure and enhancing user experience. Unlike other tokens in the crypto space the TestME token isn’t for speculation or trading, it’s a non-monetary token used only for testing purposes. This limited access test is designed to expose technical issues and get users familiar with the platform before the launch of Magic Eden’s governance token ME.

What Is the TestME Token?

The TestME token is a dry run, an experimental token with no value, used only for testing Magic Eden’s infrastructure. This token allows users to interact with a simulated ME token environment. Magic Eden will use this token to test technical issues and improve user experience before the governance token ME is launched.

This token is designed to get users familiar with the claiming process and to check their wallets are set up correctly. The TestME token is only available to a specific group – users who have interacted with Magic Eden in the last 6 months and have the Magic Eden Wallet. This limited access also takes into account regulatory requirements, excluding users from the U.K. and U.S.

Token Purpose and Restrictions

TestME token has a clear non-speculative purpose. Magic Eden has taken steps to make sure this token can’t be traded or seen as an investment vehicle.

Magic Eden has been clear in not allowing any trading of the TestME token as it’s only for technical evaluation. This controlled approach shows the platform’s commitment to responsible asset management and transparency to mitigate the risks of market speculation.

By simulating the token experience in a non-monetary environment, Magic Eden highlights the importance of preparation and controlled testing in the blockchain space.

Lessons from similar tests

Magic Eden’s approach is in line with the industry best practices where technical trials and incentivized testnets have proven to be super valuable for pre-launch testing.

Take ZetaChain’s Incentivized Testnet for example, it got over 25,000 applications in a week. This shows the community interest and allowed the platform to find and fix technical issues before mainnet launch.

Similarly Sui’s Testnet Wave 2 was focused on testing validator performance and tokenomics, it was a controlled environment where users could respond to simulated price changes. This test helped Sui to fine tune its economic model and resulted to a more stable and user friendly experience.

Rivalz Network also had an incentivized testnet where users earned points by participating in daily activities and running light clients. This encouraged active engagement and stress tested the platform’s infrastructure.

These examples show the value of technical trials in blockchain projects. By observing user behavior, gathering feedback and stress testing the infrastructure platforms can have a smoother user experience and more robust systems at launch. Magic Eden’s TestME token follows this path, so the governance token will be smoother by addressing the issues upfront.

What’s next

The TestME token test is a sneak peek into the upcoming Magic Eden token airdrop. Magic Eden sees the ME token as a part of its operational model, to drive community engagement and decentralized decision making. The upcoming governance token will give holders voting power, so users can actively participate and shape the ecosystem.

Also the ME token will support multiple blockchain platforms including Ethereum and Bitcoin so it will be more widely available and integrated. This cross-chain approach is in line with the industry trend towards interoperability and makes Magic Eden a forward-thinking player in the NFT space.

Responsible innovation

The TestME token shows Magic Eden’s commitment to responsible innovation. In an environment where hype and speculation is everywhere the TestME token is a reminder to be cautious and stable. By testing in real user experience without financial risk Magic Eden is not only making the platform more reliable but also educating users on how to engage responsibly in the digital asset space.

As Magic Eden moves forward the TestME token could be a blueprint for other platforms to combine user education with infrastructure testing. This cautious approach to token management could be the start of a new era of accountability and forward-thinking in the crypto space.

In short the TestME token is more than a test, it’s Magic Eden’s way to solidify the infrastructure, improve user experience and get ready for a future where ME token holders will be in control. Through this Magic Eden is saying the future of digital assets is not in hype but in stable user centric ecosystems built on responsible practices.

Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Owen Skelton.