Since its launch in 2015, the Ethereum network (ETH) has undergone numerous updates via the deployment of hard forks. This one has just closed the updates for the year 2021, with the deployment of Arrow Glacier on its mainnet.
Arrow Glacier makes its entry on ethereum
Since the beginning of the year, Ethereum has undergone 2 major updates through the deployment of the Berlin hard forks in April and London in August. In total, these 2 updates introduced 9 different EIPs, including the long-awaited EIP 1559, which modified the fee mechanism on the network of the prince of cryptos.
On Friday, December 9, the network witnessed its third and final hard fork of the year with the deployment of Arrow Glacier.
Unlike its predecessors, Arrow Glacier has only one EIP: the EIP 4345. This EIP will postpone the difficulty bomb to June 2022, whereas it was initially planned for the end of 2021.
As a reminder, the difficulty bomb is the mechanism that will gradually increase the difficulty of mining on Ethereum in anticipation of the transition to Ethereum 2.0. This mechanism notably allows to push miners to abandon the original chain, by making it unprofitable to exploit, in order to favor the migration to the proof of stake.
What can we expect from ethereum in 2022?
Obviously, Arrow Glacier does not mark the end of updates on Ethereum. These are expected to pick up in 2022, a year full of twists and turns. Indeed, many evolutions are planned for 2022. Among them, we can mention the most important update of the network: “The Merge”.
The Merge is the process that will be put in place to move Ethereum from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS). In effect, the application layer of Ethereum 1.0 will be attached to the consensus layer of Ethereum 2.0, i.e. the beacon chain.
Although no specific date has been announced yet, The Merge is expected to take place in the first half of 2022. In the meantime, the process of changing the consensus mode is being actively tested on various devnets and should be available on testnets soon.
Let’s hope that 2022 will also be the year of awareness on Ethereum. Indeed, many efforts must still be made to better secure the ecosystem, which is far too gangrened by hacks in 2021.
Finally, 2022 could well be the year of the democratization of second layer solutions (L2). These solutions have experienced a significant growth in 2021 and could well become the reference solutions for the DeFi ecosystem in 2022.
