The Ethereum test network has passed the Merge before the upcoming blockchain transition to proof-of-stake consensus.
Now seems that it finally has happened: full Ethereum PoS-transition is a matter of coming months.
Vitalik Buterin’s team has been teasing the community with their Merge for at least the last 3-4 years.
Actually, a lot of people didn’t believe that this could happen anytime soon. But today the fact is real and the Ethereum network will drop mining till the end of the year.
The platform chose not the most appropriate time to make such a massive change. But some say it could even help Ether to become the real new-gen web3 crypto.
Lately, the Ethereum Ropsten testnet was already merged. If all goes well – the main Ethereum network will undergo the Merge in a few months.
How did the Ethereum testnet come through the Merge?
“The Ropsten network just merged! One of the last testnets until we merge on the Ethereum mainnet,” Ether developers wrote on Twitter.
As we know, the Merge is a PoS-consensus transition on the Beacon Chain. Once Ethereum shifts from PoW to PoS, validators who have staked the required 32 ETH will take over the role of adding new blocks to the blockchain.
So miners wouldn’t be required anymore to maintain the network.
Right now the Beacon Chain runs along with the current Ether proof-of-work chain, coordinating that validators are already creating and validating new blocks.
In the coming months, the two chains will merge and Ethereum would work as a PoS blockchain. That’s why we call this milestone ‘The Merge’.
Ropsten testnet merge was the first completely successful full test of its kind. It helps developers to make future steps toward the real Merge on mainnet.
The next tests should be maintained on the Goerli and Seoplia Ether test networks.
Who is against the Merge?
The Merge should pave the way to Ethereum scalability and solve its main problems like high transaction fees, energy-intense mining, etc.
Despite that, some critics think that the PoS-transition can actually play a bad joke on the Ether platform.
Recently the head of blockchain and crypto research at trading platform Uphold Martin Hiesboeck commented on the topic.
“Ethereum is in trouble and we don’t see a quick way outю The entire idea of staking Ethereum was nonsense from the start, as we pointed out months before the first anticipated launch date for Merge last year,” he said.
Hiesboeck thinks that the growing number of decentralized finance hacks that are happening on the Ethereum network is the main concern for current ETH investors.
Anyway, now it seems that the Ether developers have passed the point of no return.
And considering how long the Merge has been preparing, they have no room for any errors.
Sources: Coindesk
