Good news for those who are eagerly awaiting The Merge. The long-awaited transition of the Ethereum (ETH) network 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.
A date for the update of Ethereum
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 schedule for The Merge is not final, but it is extremely exciting to see it come together. Please consider this a planning schedule 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, Goerli being the last major step before the final migration.
Moreover, as stated in the screenshot, the mainnet update will be applied on the mentioned date if “the Merge of Goerli does not explode”.
Let’s make it clear that these dates are not set in stone, and that this is an indicative timeline.
The positive signs, and the not-so-good ones
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 goal was to test the Miner Extractable Value (MEV) in order to see how the validators (who will replace the miners) of the network would be rewarded once the update is done.
Previously, on June 9, the Ropsten testnet migrated to Proof of Stake, and this went well 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 this new date of September 19, especially because of the recent Grey Glacier update, serving to move back the difficulty bomb by 100 days. Currently, the difficulty bomb has been pushed back to October 2022.
The difficulty bomb is used to entice 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.
