Good news for those eagerly awaiting The Merge. The Ethereum (ETH) network’s long-awaited transition from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) is expected on September 19. While waiting for the mainnet update, the Goerli testnet is expected to make its update on August 11.
An update date for Ethereum
The members of the Ethereum Foundation seem to have agreed on important future dates regarding the future of the Ethereum blockchain (ETH).
According to a recently established timetable, put forward by superphiz, community manager of the Beacon Chain, the long-awaited update “The Merge” is expected to be rolled out to the mainnet on September 19.
This merge timeline isn’t final, but it’s extremely exciting to see it coming together. Please regard this as a planning timeline and look out for official announcements!https://t.co/ttutBceZ21 pic.twitter.com/MY8VFOv0SI
– superphiz.eth (@superphiz) July 14, 2022
” This schedule for The Merge is not final, but it is extremely exciting to see it come together. Please consider this a planning calendar and look for official announcements!”
As a reminder, The Merge is Ethereum’s full migration from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) provided by the Beacon Chain.
Second interesting announcement, which concerns an earlier date: The Merge update could be applied to the Goerli testnet on August 11. This is a very important date, as Goerli is the last major step before the final migration.
Moreover, as stated in the screenshot, the mainnet update will be applied on the date mentioned if “the Merge of Goerli does not explode”.
It should be noted that these dates are not set in stone, and that this is an indicative timetable.
The good signs, and the not so good
The latest good news for the Ethereum blockchain: the 9th shadow fork, conducted on July 14, was successful. A shadow fork consists in evaluating the impact of some new features on the mainnet.
In this case, the aim was to test the Miner Extractable Value (MEV) to see how the validators (who will replace the miners) of the network would be rewarded once the update was implemented.
Previously, on 9 June, the Ropsten testnet migrated to Proof of Stake, and this went ahead without any major problems. This is also very good news, as the Ropsten network is the closest in structure to the Ethereum mainnet.
On the other hand, some people have expressed doubts about the new date of 19 September, especially because of the recent Grey Glacier update, which serves to move the difficulty bomb back 100 days. Currently, the difficulty bomb has been pushed back to October 2022.
The difficulty bomb is used to encourage miners to redirect to the validation process by making the mining difficulty extremely difficult.
Ether (ETH) is now trading at $1263, which is up 2.2% over the past 24 hours. This is significantly higher than Bitcoin (BTC), which has risen by only 0.2% over the same period.
