The long-awaited transition of Ethereum (ETH) from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is about to happen. Indeed, Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet nodes now support Proof-of-Stake (PoS). A giant step that suggests that the launch of The Merge upgrade will take place in the near future.
Ethereum closer than ever to The Merge
Ethereum is making great strides in hard forking its mainnet . Specifically, the smart contract blockchain has completed the rollout of The Merge on the Sepolia testnet. This is the second of three test nets intended to test network performance before the full migration of Ethereum (ETH) to PoS. Thus, the success of this step heralds the imminent abandonment of Proof-of-Work (PoW).
Prior to the Sepolia update, validators had to scale consensus-layer and execution-layer clients simultaneously. As a reminder, the first makes it possible to implement PoS thanks to the Beacon Chain. As for the second, it supports transactions, smart contracts and DApps.
Incidentally, the merge on Sepolia happened when the total difficulty on the PoW channel exceeded 17,000,000,000,000,000. Which happened last Wednesday around 5:00 p.m. GMT. Note that, so far, the update of the testnet has not caused any notable malfunction.
What to expect next?
The Merge actually refers to the convergence of Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake on the Ethereum network. As a result, after upgrading the mainnet, the mainnet will no longer appeal to miners. Instead, it will look to validating nodes to stake their ethers to validate transactions.
Despite the many slowdowns that the project has suffered, the success of its implementation on the Segolia testnet is rather promising. Ethereum is planning a hard fork on the mainnet in the current year. However, for the moment, it is still unknown when exactly this will happen.
Furthermore, after Segolia, the next step is the Goerli test network, which will be launched in the coming weeks. Last month, it was the Ropsten testnet’s turn to host The Merge. An operation that went off without a hitch.
For the entire crypto community, this transition from PoW to PoS is a major event. This is an opportunity for Vitalik Buterin’s baby to considerably reduce its energy load and increase the flow of transactions. Additionally, it should allow scalability through Layer 2 rollups.
