Ethereum’s Privacy Focused Blockchain – Gnosis Chain migrates to Proof of Stake

Months after Ethereum’s Beacon Merge, Gnosis – a privacy blockchain built on the Ethereum blockchain will shift from its original Proof of Authority to Proof of Stake. The merge will be conducted on December 8, 2022, with a certain level of Total Terminal  Difficulty. The TTD increase makes it difficult for a miner to solve an algorithmic problem. While Total Terminal Difficulty is a term associated with Proof of Work protocol blockchains, it is also associated with Proof of Authority. This merge will be different than Ethereum’s PoW to PoS. 

The Gnosis swap will be different as the blockchain is swapping from Proof of Authority to Proof of Stake. The project released its first official merge-ready clients on November 23, 2022. The project is secured by 100k validators already. The GIP-16 was rolled to kick-start the operations for the merge. Some eminent projects like POAP, and Curve-Fi are powered by the Gnosis system. The project transitioned into a DAO in 2020 giving its community complete authority to develop the project. In 2021, the project partnered with xDAI to merge their ecosystems together. With the Gnosis PoS merge, xDAI will also largely benefit as the new transition will help the project scale incredibly. 

📣 Official Merge Announcement

The highly anticipated Gnosis Merge is upon us! 🦉

The Gnosis Chain Merge is expected around Thu Dec 08 18:47 2022 UTC.

🧵Details below👇 pic.twitter.com/qy1WYkvwBT

— Gnosis Chain 🦉 (@gnosischain) December 6, 2022

Why is Gnosis switching from Proof of Authority Consensus to Proof of Stake?

In a proof of authority blockchain, validators are selected to add blocks based on their reputation on-chain. This is quite similar to how traditional finance works. With PoA, the system works on complex mechanisms on filtering the bad reputed validators based on their on-chain available data. This helps the chain build faith and instill integrity in network participants. Similar to Proof of Stake, Proof of Authority requires less validators and is more systematic. However, Proof of Authority is centralized as compared to Proof of Stake. The said authorities on-chain make the validators go through many checks making the scalability of the chain slightly difficult which makes the chain more congested. 

After Gnosis Merge is complete the blockchain will have 100,000 validators as compared to 20 at the time of writing. This will surpass Ethereum’s validator count.    

“In the trilemma of scalability, decentralization, and security, we focus on decentralization,” Stefan George, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Gnosis, told CoinDesk. “Contrary to many ‘Ethereum killers,’ which favor scalability over decentralization, cheap blockspace is a commodity whereas decentralized blockspace is a scarce resource.”

Is this the season for mergers?

George had planned the merge way before Ethereum did. He said that we wanted to do the Beacon chain merge before Ethereum’s but turns out it was more difficult for Gnosis to merge with the standalone Proof of Stake Beacon chain. The change required the developer team to make complex changes to the existing code of the project. 

“We were delighted to see that the Ethereum Merge was successful and also had increased confidence that we can apply the Merge successfully to the Gnosis Chain,” George commented.

The season of Blockchain merge has sent waves to projects like Dogecoin to consider moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism for a number of reasons. 

Read more: Top Proof of Stake Tokens

Source: CoinDesk