No more delays, only updates – Ethereum’s Merge is getting closer than ever. Goerli, Ethereum’s major testnet, has finally completed its move to a Proof-of-Stake.
The deployment went smoothly and was carried out from Wednesday night through Thursday, August 12. This event marks an important step in the transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.
The countdown to Merge, which is set for September 19, may now begin for those who have long supported the Ethereum network.
To ensure everything runs smoothly with Goerli, the Ethereum developers conducted more than 25 experiments and testing on multiple testnets, including Rayonism, Amphora, and Kintsugi.
Looking Good Merge!
Goerli is one of three public tests before running the app on the mainnet, and also one of the last two important upgrades before Merge.
Goerli’s testnet required a two-step process in which the testnet merge was successfully implemented after the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) exceeded 10,790,000.
The Goerli testnet merged with the Prater testnet, a chain of Proof-of-Stake beacons that represents the last test run before the actual Merge takes place.
TTD marks the end of Proof-of-Work and the beginning of Proof-of-Stake. For example, in Ropsten Merge, TTD is 500000000000000000000 ie the block that reaches this level of TTD will be the last PoW block, and the next block after that will be the first PoS block.
Goerli also encountered some minor issues like the previous two tests, but developer Marius van der Vijden insists this did not cause major problems in the final update.
“There was some confusion on the network because of two different terminal blocks and lots of non-updated nodes, so we didn’t finalize earlier. We’re still looking into whats happening, but so far it looks quite good,” Marius van der Vijden underlined.
After Goerli, the final upgrade is scheduled for September 6. The upgrade, called Bellatrix, will kickstart the Merge and get everything up and running.
As planned by the development team, mainnet consolidation will take place 14 days after the Bellatrix upgrade with the expectation of the network reaching a TTD of 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
According to what we currently know, the Merge could take place on September 19, as some devs had previously stated.
Of course, the technical team could choose to delay the update until the data is written into the client in the event of some unanticipated circumstance.
However, this information demonstrates the success of the switch to PoW across all testnets.
Divided Opinions
The crypto world has been flooded with divergent views in the run-up to the big move. The possibility of an Ethereum fork using Proof-of-Work has been highlighted in recent days.
According to Galois Capital, a cryptocurrency hedge company, many individuals and entities may fork PoW Ethereum, mentioning Bitcoin Cash, a fork of Bitcoin formed in August 2017.
After Galois Capital’s statement went viral, Vitalik Buterin retaliated. Galois Capital, on the other hand, is still standing. The hedge fund is well-known for the Terra (LUNA) event, having correctly predicted the collapse of the stablecoin in 2021.
Despite the debate, both Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) stated their support for the Merge. Binance indicated that, in addition to supporting the long-awaited upgrade, it would “evaluate and consider” support for Ethereum’s fork.
The vast majority of investors are optimistic about Merge’s prospects. The price of Ether increased by more than 10% on Wednesday and even more on Thursday.
Over the past two months, there has been a trend of whales purchasing Ether with the expectation that market consolidation will result in an increase in price. At the time of writing, Ether is trading around $1,900.
After The Merge is operational, the next phase will be sharding. Ethereum’s Sharding is designed to improve data storage on the blockchain while also lowering expenses.
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