The Ethereum merger could come sooner than anticipated as core developers announced a tentative merge date of September 15in which the transition of the blockchain to Proof-of-Stake will take place.
The date of the Ethereum mainnet merger was made public after the core developerslike Tim Beiko and Prysmatic Labs co-founder Terence Tsao, agreed at a developer call on August 11 that that would be when the Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) reached 58750000000000000000000.
This was confirmed in a Github post titled “Tentative mainnet TTD”, which was confirmed by Beiko on August 11.
Although the exact date and TTD could change, the success of the various testnet mergers could be a promising sign that the Ethereum mainnet will transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus next month without a hitch.
The new official calendar is at least three days ahead of Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko’s last prediction of September 19.
Tentative Mainnet TTD
58750000000000000000000
Note: nothing is final until it’s in client release, so do expect changes last minute due to unforeseen circumstances https://t.co/PQ0YOKpk1u
— terence.eth (@terencechain) August 11, 2022
Core Network Tentative TTD: 58750000000000000000000
Note: Nothing is final until it’s in the client version, so expect last minute changes due to unforeseen circumstances.
The long number provided is called the Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD), and it specifies the end of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and when the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) will begin. The TTD is the total difficulty required for the last block to be mined before the transition to PoS.
Before the merge can be completed, the fork of Bellatrix must be done which will implement the necessary software for clients to run the consensus layer. This is programmed for september 6approximately 10 days before the merger.
On August 12, the Goerli testnet became the latest testnet to successfully make its own transition to PoS, following the merger of Sepolia on July 7 and Ropsten on June 9.
After the merger, the power consumption of the Ethereum network is expected to be reduced by more than 99.99%, network attacks can be prevented, and scalability will be improved.
PoW miners want to do their thing
Nevertheless, There are rumors that Ether (ETH) miners, many of whom rely on revenue generated from PoW block rewards, will continue to run the original PoW version of Ethereum to maintain their earning potential.
Bitcoin (BTC) and ETH miner and angel investor in cryptocurrencies Chandler Guo, a proponent of PoW chains, is leading the charge for miners to fork the Ethereum network to create an Ethereum PoW (ETHW) chain. Guo seems to think there is enough room in the industry for two types of Ethereum to exist, and has retweeted a number of opinions supporting the notion.
pow pos both ok https://t.co/f6uReMzyca
— Chandler Guo (@ChandlerGuo) August 10, 2022
PoW or PoS, both are fine.
It has committed to releasing the code necessary to perform an ETH PoW hard fork that bypasses the difficulty bomb, which is a mechanism that significantly reduces the block reward for miners to discourage them from trying to produce more blocks. The difficulty bomb will immediately precede the mainnet meltdown.
ETHW is trading around 7.5% lower at $72.5 on Poloniex. Meanwhile, ETH has gained 1.5% in the last 24 hours to $1,881.54according to CoinGecko.
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