Key facts:
The developers expect the process to start over the weekend.
The merger has already been tested at Ropsten and, after Sepolia, Goerli will follow.
The transition from Ethereum to Ethereum 2.0, which will take place through the so-called “merger” (The Merge) between the current and the new blockchain, still has its pre-tests. In the next few days it will be the turn of Sepolia, the second test network in which this process will be experienced.
From the merger, which will take place possibly on Saturday July 2 or Sunday July 3, Sepolia will switch to proof-of-stake (Proof-of-Stake or PoS) to validate new blocks on your blockchain. This is something that another testnet, Ropsten, has been doing since June 8, and it will be replicated on the mainnet sometime in the second half of 2022.
According to detailed the developers of the Ethereum Foundation, After the merger, Sepolia will have a set of select validators. The rest of the validators will have to move to Goerli, the last testnet to test the merger in July or August.
As for the main network, the Gray Glacier update took place on June 30, which was intended to delay the difficulty bomb until mid-September. This bomb will increase the difficulty of mining in the network until it becomes impossible to execute this method.
Once a certain difficulty is reached, the transition to Ethereum 2.0 will be made and validators will come into play to meet proof of stake and thus validate transactions on the network. Furthermore, as CriptoNoticias recently reported, this will imply the closure of three test networks, while only Sepolia and Goerli will remain active for new experiments with the new version of the network.
The step by step of the merger to Ethereum 2.0
The developers at the Ethereum Foundation explain in their post that the merger differs from previous Ethereum updates in two ways. On the one hand, demands that node operators run and update their clients in the execution layer (Ethereum) and in the consensus layer (Ethereum 2.0), instead of running only one of them. Both are required to run a node on the network after the merge.
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On the other hand, the merge will be activated on both chains (the original and the new one) at two different points. First, the Bellatrix upgrade will be activated on the Beacon Chain, the original Ethereum 2.0 shard that is active (but not validating transactions) since December 2020. Bellatrix will be in charge of monitoring the activation of the difficulty bomb.
Sepolia’s Beacon Chain already complied with this update on June 20, and now the following should occur in the execution layer of this testnet. This step is to reach the difficulty bomb trigger point, the milestone that will trigger the merger of the current Ethereum side of the chain.
Upon reaching the block that is determined for the execution of the difficulty bomb, the mining difficulty will be raised to the maximum, which will indicate to Bellatrix that the Beacon Chain must mine the next block. When that block is complete, approximately 13 minutes later, the merge will be considered complete.