The Merge is coming

It seems that The Merge will happen soon. The developers say it will be in August, and the main Ethereum test network is already set up for a proof-of-stake merge in early June.

For the second month, I have been telling you, dear readers, about the great and terrible The Merge. A powerful announcement which promises to complete the update in the second quarter of 2022, a subsequent delay, a mysterious difficulty bomb. A lot of things have happened during this time. And, it seems, the developers have really reached the finish line.

Apparently, difficulty bomb strongly motivated the developers to finish The Merge as quickly as possible so that they would not have to face a network slowdown that would certainly cause difficulty bomb. Because of this, The Merge will have to be delayed again. Tim Beiko spoke about this recently when the delaying of The Merge was discussed:

“If client developers do not think they can deploy The Merge to mainnet before block times are slowed too much, it will need to be delayed again.”

At the Permissionless conference, Preston Van Loon, a core developer of the Ethereum network, said that if everything goes according to plan, The Merge will happen in August:

“As far as we know, if everything goes to plan, August — it just makes sense. If we don’t have to move [the difficulty bomb], let’s do it as soon as we can.”

Also, the fact that The Merge will happen in August was also stated by the father of Ethereum — Vitalik Buterin. He agreed with the position of other developers during the ETH Shanghai Summit. But Vitalik added that September and October are also a possible times to complete The Merge.

The testers announced the near readiness of The Merge. In AllCoreDevs Update 011, the testers said that there are a few points left to complete for the upcoming The Merge.

«Once these things happen, and we’ve observed them be stable for a few weeks, we’ll be ready to move to mainnet!»

In pre-emption of The Merge, Ethereum’s public testnet, Ropsten will also merge. This test merge is scheduled for June 8. Preston Van Loon noted that “merging Ropsten is a huge testing milestone towards Ethereum’s mainnet merge later this year.”

And that’s not all! The Ethereum Foundation stated that the upcoming The Merge complicates the security of the network, therefore, the reward for detecting bugs has increased. Now you can get up to $500,000 if you know how to look for vulnerabilities.

«As the Execution Layer and Consensus Layer become more and more interconnected, it is increasingly valuable to combine the security efforts of these layers. There are already multiple efforts being organized by client teams and the community to further increase knowledge and expertise across the two layers. Unifying the Bounty Program will further increase visibility and coordination efforts on identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities.»

There is more news every day. It can be seen that all Ethereum developers are working hard, and have already reached the finish line. I hope that we will not be held back by any new delays, and everything will go according to plan. We continue to observe.