The development of ethereum 2.0 is seemingly moving faster than expected with all major clients now connected to each other in a Local Area Network (LAN) setting.

According to Adrian Manning, co-founder of Lighthouse’s Sigma Prime, various different eth 2.0 node clients written in different programming languages can now “talk.”

Manning publicly said Status’ Nimbus, PegaSy’s Artemis, Trinity and ChainSafe’s Lodestar are all interoperable with each other.

“We didn’t expect 3-4 clients being able to communicate so early in the interop locking so we didn’t plan for that,” Mamy Ratsimbazafy of Status told Trustnodes when asked of a time estimate as to when a testnet might be expected.

“We’ll release one when a sufficient number of clients are comfortable with all parts of the spec,” says Jacek Sieka, another eth 2.0 dev from the Nimbus team.

An eth 2.0 implementers call is now to be held on Thursday with the agenda to be published shortly.

That’s when they may discuss what needs to happen to get the testnet running with the Interop Meeting still continuing.

“We’re still in the middle of it and really the best time would be during the Eth2 implementers’ call,” Ratsimbazafy says in regards to a summary of the progress made so far at the meeting.

Apparently you can ask questions in the chatbox during the implementers call, with it unclear whether we might expect any surprise, like an actual testnet launch.

By the sound of it, it looks like a testnet of sorts between the clients only is already running with more than 100 epochs (a group of 64 blocks per epoch) finalized between two or more clients.

Opening that to the general public then creates the lab like environment where eth2.0 is basically running, but with play coins.

That should be out at an undetermined time but maybe sometime this month or before devcon, with the testnet then to run for about 3-4 months prior to the main-net launch when you can transfer your eth through a deposit contract to the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain.

So it looks like this is now sort of finished, with just final touches left, refinements, strengthening up the code, getting rid of any bugs, an audit at some point, and then the launch.

The launch has a target date of January, perhaps soon after the new year, with the many implementation teams seemingly making sufficient progress to reach the target provided the testnet period goes fine.

Once out, anyone with 32 eth can just park it on the stake chain to earn more eth at a rate of 5%-8% per year.

Those with less than 32 eth can probably use a pool with companies like Coinbase likely to provide staking services.

Just what all this will look like from an end-user’s perspective may well be explained further at devcon next month when the deposit contract launches.

At that point the process begins as people start transferring eth to the deposit contract, so taking out some supply from circulation.

A lot more supply will then be removed later next year when finality is added to the Proof of Work (PoW) chain if they can manage it, at which point new supply will be reduced by 2/3rds.

Full on sharding then follows somewhat soon after that in 2021, with it all looking like perhaps it is all coming together after about two years of research and development so far.

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