Network developer Tim Beiko has announced the Bellatrix upgrade slated for June 2, with an Ethereum merge expected earlier this month. This improvement is an upgrade that makes the Ropsten Beacon Chain ready for merge.
On May 30, Ethereum announced the launch of a new beacon chain on the Ropsten network to provide consensus. Subsequently, Biko said on Twitter that ‘Ethereum’s longest-lived PoW testnet is moving towards Proof of Stake, and the merge is expected around June 8th.’
But according to the developer, in order to be merged on the date given on Ropsten, the network needs to upgrade to “merge-compatible protocol rules” at slot 24,000 on June 2. This essentially means that after the Bellatrix upgrade, the Difficulty (TTD) will be chosen to activate a Terminal Total Merge.
TTD price will be announced after Bellatrix upgrade
Ethereum developers have explained that “because the hash rate of the proof-of-work testnet is very volatile, the TTD value will first be set to an extremely high value,” only further noting that a new TTD value will be chosen and only announced by Bellatrix. After upgrade.
That said, more details about TTD for node operators are expected on June 3. Seeing a merge is set up to update both the consensus and execution layer clients for node operators.
Meanwhile, Biko specified, “After the merge, if you have run a node/verifier on the Beacon chain, now you must also run an execution client. Similarly, if you run a node on the PoW chain, then You should be running a consensus layer client.”
Meanwhile, validators are alerted to ensure that ‘transactions in the blocks they have created and verified are valid’ post-merger. For this, they are reportedly being encouraged to collect priority fees from the transactions.
The developer also specified that ‘the first upgrade after The Merge will introduce withdrawals from the beacon chain.’
What happens after the Ropsten merge
The Ropsten merge will follow the PoS transition on two more testnets – Goerly and Sepulia. And so far, Ethereum has tested merge implementations on Kintsugi and Kiln.
However, none of these infections affected the Ethereum mainnet. Therefore, Ether holders and network users will not be affected until the main show this summer.
That said, as the Ethereum mainnet merges closer, the broad consensus is that it will have a positive effect on the price of ETH.
In a recent Bloomberg interview, Don Fitzpatrick, chief executive and chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management, said that Ethereum is likely to gain some more traction over bitcoin in the future due to environmental concerns.
However, at press time, ETH is still at the crucial $2,000 level on CoinGecko. This figure is a 60% discount from its all-time high of $4,878 in November 2021. Notably, over the past 30 days, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap has lost over 30% of its value.
In contrast, Ethereum remains the leader on the DeFi front. On DeFiLlama, Ethereum currently dominates over $71 billion, about 64% of the total value locked within dApps. But in terms of the number of protocols on the network, Binance Smart Chain is closely following 400 protocols compared to 490 on Ethereum.