A surprising topic showed up yesterday on the EOS-subreddit. The devs are ahead of schedule and user “knowbean” spotted this on their GitHub and made a topic about it:

EOS Public Testnet coming on 4th December — 4 weeks ahead of schedule!

Of course this got a lot of upvotes because everyone who follows a crypto-project is used to delays. But here we are. The devs are weeks ahead of schedule when it comes to starting a test-network and multi-core support.

What to expect

From a user perspective the testnet won’t probably bring that much to the table right at the beginning. At least, that is what I expect. It’s great to know that there’s a blockchain running but unless you interact with it there’s not that much to see. For the Block Producers (BPs) there is a lot to learn though. EOS is quite a new concept and a new block every second (or even every 500 ms!) is completely unknown in the world of smart contracts.

Here in a few weeks…

The most important point to make here is that we’ll see P2P-communication for the first time with EOS. The real geeks out there can already run local wallets and contracts while producing their own blocks. But now the time has come to connect all nodes to each other and share transactions, blocks and therefore the state of the network. Dawn 2.0 (as the testnet is called) will support single threaded execution which allows up to 10.000 Ts/sec. Not bad for a testnet and sure good enough for testing the first dApps on the network.

dApps

Are there already some dApps out there? The answer is yes. Well,…… euh… the contracts are out there. Some dice game, a token exchange, a social media contract… We probably have to wait before someone connects one of these contracts to a nice user interface (could be just a webb app) for us all to play with. Still I expect them to pop up quite fast though. Feel free to share your dApp on our community forum as we have a dedicated #app category for everything that runs on EOS.

The testnet is expected to run “for a long time” as Brock Pierce stated the other day. He probably means that it will run from December up to June when the real network is expected to go live. That’s around 6 months for everyone to test their dApps and for the EOS platform to be tested to the max. Hopefully we’ll see a lot of test-dApps to give us a view of all the EOS possibilities. Decentralized exchanges like Bitshares and Etherdelta probably give use a good glimpse from a trading/financial perspective. For the other features we’ll have to wait a bit longer. Only a few weeks though.

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