While the transition to proof-of-stake is supposed to happen soon for the Ethereum blockchain, the “difficulty bomb” has been delayed again. This inevitably leads to a longer timeframe for The Merge to take place.
Difficulty Bomb delayed by 2 months
After meeting on Friday, the core developers of the Ethereum blockchain have decided to delay what is known as the “difficulty bomb”. This is a critical component in the network’s transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).
The difficulty bomb was built into Ethereum’s code in 2016 to force miners to accept the network upgrade. Last week, the Ropsten testnet officially went under proof-of-stake consensus. This was a “first dress rehearsal” for the merge according to Ethereum’s lead developers.
After discussing a number of bugs revealed by the test merge, the developers propose to delay the difficulty bomb until August 2022. This has already been delayed five times.
Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko confirmed this in a tweet on Friday:
In short, we agreed to the bomb delay. We were already over time, and want to be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time, but we are aiming for a ~2 month delay, and for the upgrade to go live late June.
– Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) June 10, 2022
This delay inevitably leads to a longer timeframe for the merger to take place.
Ben Edgington, another lead Ethereum developer, said in a tweet that he sincerely hoped the merger would not be delayed.
What is the difficulty bomb?
The Ethereum blockchain, with its main cryptocurrency Ether (ETH), will migrate from a proof-of-work (PoW) model to a proof-of-stake (PoS) model which should make the blockchain much more efficient and less energy intensive. This migration is called “The Merge”.
The blockchain is currently powered by miners who use remote computers to solve complex mathematical problems to record and verify transactions, just like on the Bitcoin blockchain.
After the famous merge, miners will instead bet cryptocurrencies to confirm transactions, and there are fears that some miners may reject the proof of stake.
To avoid this scenario, the difficulty bomb increases the difficulty of the block (the time it takes miners to verify and add a transaction to the blockchain) exponentially over time.
Over a long period of time, it becomes impossible for miners to extract new transactions due to the near-infinite block difficulty, forcing the end of proof-of-work on Ethereum.
This upgrade to proof-of-stake should drastically reduce the energy consumption of the blockchain.
But if the difficulty bomb is executed at the wrong time, it could shut down Ethereum before the merge is complete. This would lead to disastrous financial results and a meteoric decline in the cryptocurrency’s price.
Ethereum’s price is falling sharply
Ether is the second largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, behind the popular Bitcoin (BTC).
The price of the cryptocurrency Ether has seen a sharp drop in the last 24 hours after the news was announced and amid a decline in the overall cryptocurrency market.
According to data from Coingecko, the ETH price is down -32% over 7 days, and -12% over the last 24 hours. It is now trading below the $1,300 mark.
ETH is now down 70% from its all-time high of $4,891.70 in November 2021.
