The Merge: What’s New?

Difficulty Bomb was delayed after all, The Merge was tested on the Ropsten network, and the full transition of Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake may take place this year.

For several months now we have been telling you about The Merge — the long-planned full transition of the Ethereum network from the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Judging by the estimated updated date, which is indicated on the Ethereum website, The Merge will take place before the end of the year. Although, in fairness, it is worth noting that this date has already been delayed several times.

What’s important that has happened since our last review of the situation around The Merge. Firstly, the Ethereum developers decided to delay the Difficulty Bomb after all.

The developers wanted to have time to conduct The Merge before the Difficulty Bomb works, but, apparently, they realized that they would not have time. Therefore, it was decided to postpone the Difficulty Bomb. This was announced on Twitter by Tim Beiko, Ethereum core developer:

Well, Ethereum miners can breathe a sigh of relief. Now they have a few more months left to pay back their gear.

The second important step of The Merge was the test merge of PoW and PoS chains in Ropsten — an Ethereum test network. On June 3, the developers published an announcement of the start of the merger in the Ethereum Foundation Blog. The announcement contained instructions for stake holders and node operators. They must “manually override the TTD in both their execution and consensus layer clients before June 7, 2022.”

The developers celebrated the successful repetition of the upcoming The Merge on livestream by EthStaker. Vitalik Buterin — co-founder of Ethereum, reminded everyone that there will be more difficulties in the process of The Merge than in the Ropsten test merge:

“I mean of course, the merge working well for 6 hours isn’t evidence of complete success <…> There are all of these kind of longer term issues around MEV and staking centralization and protection against DOS attacks and things that could potentially bite us 3 weeks after the merge instead of 2 minutes during the process.”

If everything goes according to plan, then The Merge will happen before the end of this year. Well, let someone disbelieve it, we hope and wait. We wish the Ethereum developers good luck and continue to observe.