Top Crypto News Today: The Long-Awaited Ethereum Merge Release Date is Officially Announced!

Key Takeaways 

• Bellatrix upgrade to set in motion on September 6, 2022. 
• During the upgrade the difficulty level will be so high that Proof of Work won’t go through possibly.
• The Merge is expected to complete between September 10 – 20, 2022.  

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Eth2 also called ‘Serenity’ is expected to complete in the month of September 2022. The Ethereum Foundation announced the tentative date of the Merge upgrade to Proof of Stake mechanism on their official website.  Ethereum blockchain was originally developed as a proof of work blockchain and is transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism for better scalability and high throughput. 

In proof of work mechanism, miners use high GPU to mine crypto assets that causes colossal carbon emissions and also slows down the network. In the Proof of Stake concept, users can stake their tokens to validate transactions on the blockchain making it a viable and environment-safe mechanism. 

The Bellatrix upgrade is scheduled on September 6, 2022. This upgrade will activate the other sub-networks to set the Merge in motion. 

The upgrade will activate at 11:34:47 UTC on September 6, 2022 at epoch 144896 on the Beacon chain. An epoch is the time slot on a blockchain when new transactions are processed. The epoch time differs from network to network. 

Post Bellatrix upgrade the Terminal Total Difficulty will increase to 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000. After the TTD reaches this point, proof of work will potentially faze out. After the upgrade, the execution layer will combine with the consensus layer on Beacon chain to complete the Merge.  

The  Ethereum Merge is the final result of multiple dress rehearsals of the POW to POS on various test networks like Rposten, Goerli and  Sepolia. 

Another update, named ‘Paris’ will occur between September 10 – 20, 2022. The team at Ethereum had previously hinted that the Merge will tentatively complete between September 15 to 16, 2022. 

The team of Ethereum aims at making the Merge a success and has rolled out a bug bounty plan for developers who can identify bugs on the network. The bounty plan has a fund of 1 million for rewarding developers to find bugs in the network.

An Overview of Ethereum’s timeline

Ethereum was founded in the year 2014 by Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson (Founder of Cardano Blockchain), Gavin Wood and Joseph Lubin. Ethereum was the first blockchain to introduce Smart Contracts on distributed ledger technology to automate business operations and help reduce administrative costs and human error. 

Ethereum was first introduced in public at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January, 2014. By the end of 2014, Ethereum opened a crowdsale of ETH tokens and raised $ 18 million. Ethereum has been the second largest blockchain with a market cap of $208,114,505,938. 

Inspired by Bitcoin technology, Ethereum focused on building a borderless network for all. Spanning across categories like DeFi, gaming, dApps DEXs’ and many other categories. These use cases on Ethereum also proliferated the use of ERC-20 token creation for applications built on top of the network. These ERC-20 tokens power the applications to operate and incentivize the community.     

Source: CoinDesk

What to expect during the Merge transition of Ethereum? 

Ethereum after the completion of Merge will become more efficient in terms of scalability. The TPS – Transaction Per Second is expected to increase from 22.33 TPS to 100,000 TPS according to Vitalik Buterin.    

Additional Read: Ethereum Price Prediction Weekly