Following the success of The Merge on Goerli, the third and final testnet for Ethereum (ETH), its arrival on the mainnet is now planned for mid-September. The first stage, Bellatrix, is planned for September 6 and will then make way for the Paris update, which will complete the process.
New date for Ethereum Merge
The Merge, the Ethereum (ETH) update that has been on everyone’s lips in recent days, is finally set to see the light of day sooner than expected.
While a provisional schedule envisaged the arrival date of the Merge for September 19, the update could finally be effective on September 15 or 16, according to information revealed during a conference between some Ethereum developers, including Tim Beiko.
Bellatrix, the first update that will trigger the switch from the current Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), is scheduled for September 6. Paris, the second update, will then take over to complete the process.
According to a new release by Tim Beiko on GitHub entitled “TTD mainnet attempt”, Paris is scheduled to trigger once the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) reaches 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000.
GitHub post by Tim Beiko
Since this unit of block measurement depends on the Ethereum hashrate, the date may vary, hence the estimate for September 15 or 16.
Of course, as long as the data is not written into the client, the technical team could decide to postpone the update in the name of some unforeseen event. However, this news is a testament to the success of the move to proof of stake across all testnets.
The planned future for Ethereum
The implementation of the proof of stake on the Goerli testnet yesterday was the last major step before the arrival of the Merge on the mainnet, which is scheduled for mid-September. However, once The Merge is done, many improvements are still planned for Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, who we no longer need to introduce, had declared that once the update was complete, the blockchain would only be 55% complete.
The next update concerns sharding, a scalability solution designed to accelerate the speed of transactions and reduce their costs. According to Vitalik, the Ethereum network, which currently processes 15 to 20 transactions per second, could then process up to 100,000.
Other implementations are planned, including Verkle Trees, a mathematical proof designed to be much more efficient than the usual Merkle trees. This should, in essence, allow anyone to become a validator without the need to store too much data.
In any case, these recent announcements have largely benefited the Ether, which has seen an almost constant rise since the announcement of the first Merge date in mid-July. Indeed, ETH is up 17% in the last 7 days alone, with a current price of $1,896.
