Top 6 Misconceptions about the Ethereum Merge

Ethereum community’s take on the Merge 

Ethereum blockchain is the top blockchain technology and ranks second in the top crypto tokens list with a market cap of $191,415,347,222. The Ethereum community has sparked mixed reactions to the Merge. While some miners from the ETH mining community have opposed the Merge there are a huge lot of supporters who have already moved to the validators’ support zone. According to Glassnode, there are approximately 1,000 validators on the network. In addition, there are more than 85,000 wallets holding more than or equal to 32 ETH required to become a validator on the chain.   

Source: Glassnode 

What is Ethereum Merge? 

Ethereum Merge is one of the most important events in the crypto industry as this is the first time a PoS (proof-of-stake) blockchain will transition to an ecologically sustainable PoW (Proof of Work) network. Ethereum blockchain will merge with the Beacon chain – a proof of stake blockchain network. 

6 Misconceptions about the upcoming Ethereum Merge

Misconception 1:

The Ethereum Merge Update will reduce the network gas fee. 

Ethereum Merge essentially denotes a change in the consensus mechanism. Ethereum blockchain is transitioning from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake blockchain – the Beacon chain. Ethereum’s merge will not increase the network capacity to process more transactions. Ethereum’s developer community is concentrated on enhancing the throughput of the network with Sharding as a roll up technology. 

Misconception 2:

Ethereum Merge will increase the speed of the blockchain and the dapps built on top of Ethereum. 

The ETH upgrade will not essentially increase the speed of transactions but will increase the block production time as validators will push blocks every 12 seconds which on the mainnet Beacon chain will be 13.3 seconds. The developers believe that the block production speed on the upgraded blockchain will increase by 10%. 

Misconception 3:

The Merge may cause downtime of the network. 

The transition from PoW to PoS will not necessarily stall the network operations unless a technical bug occurs. The developers have ruled out any possibility of a downtime during the Merge. 

Misconception 4:

Investors who have staked ETH will be able to withdraw their assets after the Merge. 

Staked ETH – stETH a crypto asset, is currently locked on the Beacon chain, is backed by ETH in 1:1 ratio. While investors may have liked to unstake their holdings from the vault, the developers have confirmed that the Merge does not allow the investors to unlock their assets. The investors who have their assets on the beacon chain will be able to unbound them during the next network upgrade called Shanghai. This means that investors will be able to get their investments after a tentative period of 6 months after the Merge is complete.

Misconception 5:

Validators on the network will not be able to withdraw their rewards after the Merge. 

While Staked Ethereum remains locked on the Beacon chain and can be available for withdrawal only after the Shanghai upgrade, the validators on the ETH network will be able to access their rewards and maximal extractable value (MEV) accrued by validators for proposing blocks for validation from the execution layer or Ethereum mainnet.

Misconception 6:

Ethereum 2.0 will airdrop Eth2 tokens to existing investors on the blockchain. 

The Merge is confused with a hard fork. In a situation of a hard fork, the token holders receive tokens that are produced on the forked blockchain. Ethereum 2.0 is simply a network upgrade and not a hard fork. 

Additional Read: How Ethereum PoS works? 

Bottomline 

The Ethereum upgrade happening on the Ethereum blockchain will help ETH in achieving its biggest feat by successfully completing the Merge. Many speculators believed that Ethereum Merge will reduce gas fees, but that’s not accurate. The merger will simply make the blockchain a Proof of Stake blockchain and will not have any impact on the operations. 

The pertinent aspect of the Merge is transforming Ethereum blockchain into a ‘green’ system as pointed out by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder, Polygon at UNFOLD 2022. The current sentiments on the Merge indicate that ‘Ethereum blockchain’ will change dramatically and for good. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum commented that after the Merge, crypto transactions will make sense. He said that there is ‘solid work happening with roll-ups like Optimism. The Ethereum upgrade has been in the pipeline for more than a year and is now closer than ever. 

Additional Read: Will Ethereum 2.0 Replace Ethereum? 

Wondering if the ETH Merge will affect CoinDCX users? 

Ethereum’s Merge is believed to occur seamlessly. In case of an event where the Ethereum chain is forked, token holders will receive the forked token from the minority chain. Spot and trading on CoinDCX will work as usual. To learn more about this please, refer to our blog