The Medalla Ethereum 2.0 testnet has been running for two months now, and in that time it has grown to 75 gigabytes in size, with over 2 million simulated ETH staked.

Following a couple of early glitches, the Medalla testnet has been running smoothly since early August and it has now grown in size to 75 gigabytes of data per node. This is more than 20% of Bitcoin’s data usage over the past decade according to reports.

The Trustnodes report added that Ethereum’s blockchain has grown quicker than Bitcoin’s at nearly 500 Gb of size in just four years.

Ethereum 2.0 Nodes Are Huge

It added that the testnet nodes for Medalla are in ‘archive mode’ which means that they keep the data for every change of state which is not necessary with full nodes on mainnet. The report questioned the size and speed of growth stating that there is not much data aside from the validation of Proof of Work blocks.

At the current rate of growth, these archive nodes would expand by around 500 Gb per year which is almost the size of the current full nodes on Ethereum 1.0.

“It’s not clear what the size of a full ethereum 2.0 testnode node is, but you’d expect it to be less by a factor of 4, meaning it’s probably about 18GB.”

According to the Medalla analytics platform, beaconcha.in, there have been over 2.1 million Goerli ETH staked on the network for testing purposes. The testnet does not use real ETH and there are no real staking rewards yet. There are currently over 68,400 active validators taking part.

Last week, a final ‘dress rehearsal’ testnet called Spadina was launched however it proved to be problematic with several errors reported with configuration, bootnodes, and calculations. A second short-term testnet called Zinken is planned for launch on October 12 and it appears that ETH 2.0 Phase one is entering its final stages of testing.

Co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that it is ‘coming very soon’ in a tweet today regaring the scaling roadmap.

Turbo Charging Ethereum

The original ETH2 roadmap was created with 3 phases:

0. PoS (this is the one that's coming very soon)
1. Sharding of data, but not of computation (that is, the sharded chain will *include* ~2 MB/sec of data, but it will just be dumb data blobs, not txs)
2. Sharded tx processing

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 5, 2020

He added that ETH 2.0 could get 6400x speed boost when sharding and rollups are combined and stacked upon each other.

“Currently, we have ~15-45 TPS. Rollups offer a ~100x increase in throughput. Sharding offers a ~64x increase. These two stack multiplicatively; rollups *on top of* sharding offer a ~6400x (!!) increase in throughput.”

Last week, CoinGape reported that there were several Layer 2 solutions already in operation for those wanting to avoid those heavy gas fees on the Ethereum network.