Ethereum’s migration to the long-awaited proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which has been repeatedly pushed back, is due sometime in August. hopefully.
Preston van Loon, a leading developer of the Ethereum (ETH) network, told attendees at the permissionless conference that if everything goes according to plan, the transition, known as a merge, will happen sometime in August.
ethereum core dev @preston_vanloon Just said that the eth merge is ready, they are only testing now, and expect the merger to happen in August. packed room @ permissionless Excited about it. great question @trustlessstate, even on the panel @drakefjustin pic.twitter.com/vX4beNatJ5
— benjicohen (benjicohen.eth) (@benjicohen421) 19 May 2022
Van Loon told 5,000 attendees that the team was looking to transition from the so-called “difficulty bomb” before the network was scheduled.
“As far as we know, if everything goes according to plan, August—it just makes sense. If we don’t have to move [the difficulty bomb]We do it as soon as possible.”
Echoing this sentiment, fellow Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said that ensuring the merge proceeds quickly was a top priority, sharing “his strong desire to do so before the difficulty bombs in August”.
The “difficulty bomb” refers to a program coded in the Ethereum blockchain that intentionally slows down the network. It was designed to encourage the transition to PoS by making it more difficult for miners on the proof-of-work (PoW) chain to stay behind after the merge.
On April 11th, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko announced that the merge has been delayed once again. Despite a successful “shadow fork test”, Biko said the merge would not be implemented as expected in June. According to Beiko, developers need to act quickly to avoid the difficulty bomb, otherwise, they will need to introduce another update to delay the bomb.
“If client developers don’t think they can deploy the merge to the mainnet before the block times are too slow, this will need to be delayed again.”
In the wake of this week’s news that has been recommended for the timeline, the Ethereum network will see a “massive testing milestone,” with the Ropsten testnet merge taking place on June 8. The Ropsten testnet will see the merged PoW test network combined with a new PoS consensus layer testnet. It will simulate what will happen once the actual merge takes place between Ethereum and Beacon Chain and it will become a PoS network.
The sharded chain upgrade, formerly known as Eth2, is slated to go live in early 2023 if the merge is successfully implemented in August, the final milestone on Ethereum’s roadmap. However, until then, the network will continue to use Layer-2. Networks like Polygon and Optimism to handle scalability and high transaction volume.
