The developers of the Ethereum network have decided to delay the difficulty bomban important step leading up to the much-anticipated Fusion update for layer 1 of the blockchain.
They have set the delay at two months to “make sure we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time”according to developer Tim Beiko in a tweet on Sunday.
In short, we agreed to the bomb delay. We were already over time, and want to be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time, but we are aiming for a ~2 month delay, and for the upgrade to go live late June.
—Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) June 10, 2022
In short, we agree with the delay of the bomb. We’re already over time, and we want to make sure we check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and rollout time, but we’re aiming for a delay of about 2 months, with the update going live by the end of the month. of June.
The difficulty bomb will be a measure to discourage Ether (ETH) mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS). ).
It drastically increases the difficulty for miners to verify transactions on the network, thereby reducing the profitability of PoW miners. Eventually it will be impossible for physical miners to validate a block. The difficulty bomb is a network feature added to the code in 2016 when plans were being formed for the Fusion to become the Consensus Layer (formerly known as Eth2).
The transition to PoS should reduce the energy demand of the Ethereum network by up to 99.9%, according to some estimates. Other PoS networks, such as Polygon and Fantom Opera, have negligible power demand compared to other PoW networks.
Although Beiko does not mention it, the difficulty bomb delay could lead to further delays for the Fusion itself, which is expected to take place in August 2022.
The Ropsten testnet on Ethereum recently completed its own successful merger to PoS on Fridaywhich the developers referred to as the “first dress rehearsal” for the actual merger.
Ethereum adoption continues to grow
Despite continued bearish sentiments in crypto markets, Ethereum’s user base remains strong. Daily transactions on the network have remained above a million for all but one day since December 2020. Measuring daily transactions gives a simple and concise look at the overall load being handled by the network.
The number of unique addresses continues to rise sharply each month. There hasn’t been a slowdown in the number of unique new wallets since it spiked in December 2017. There are now around 198 million unique wallets on Ethereum, an increase of 14.5 times since December 7, 2017.
The price of ETH is down along with most cryptocurrencies in the last 24 hours by 6.8%, trading at $1,360according to CoinGecko.
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