BNB Chain has announced that the BNB Beacon Chain testnet will be initiated in January 2023. This hard fork upgrade is projected to occur at block heights 34,587,202 and 34,963,303, at 3:00 (UTC) on 2nd Jan 2023 and 12 Jan 2023. . According to BNB Chain, all validators on the testnet are expected to migrate their software to v0.10.4 by 2nd Jan.
Einstein is the name of the proposed hard fork. Hard Forks are upgrades carried out on blockchains as a result of new changes that are being introduced into the network which will not be compatible with the existing chain.
Hardforks also require a large number of validators on a blockchain to initiate. For the BNB Beacon Chain, two-thirds of its validators must agree to a hard fork for it to be successful.
Expected changes from the BNB Beacon Chain Testnet upgrade
BNB Beacon Chain explained that the upgrade, also known as BEP159, will create a permissionless validator election mechanism and allow staking on the Beacon Chain. In essence, anyone can either become a validator by staking their BNB or allowing other validators to use their BNB.
In exchange for staking their BNB, producing new blocks, and securing the network, validators will be rewarded, BNB Beacon Chain added. Furthermore, validators will be granted the right to vote on other proposals coming into the BNB Beacon Chain.
A breakdown of the staking process revealed that it will happen in three phases. The first will be an open self-delegation for validators, enabling new reward distribution and a new validator election mechanism.
The next phase is the validator creation stage, where anyone can stake enough BNB to become a validator of Beacon Chain. Then the last phase is the open delegation. Here, anyone can delegate their BNB to a validator and get a reward in return.
Further details revealed that holders of BNB on several exchanges don’t have to bother about the change except they receive updates from the exchanges they use.
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