On Tuesday, the Ethereum Foundation officially announced the schedule for the much-anticipated blockchain update dubbed the Merge, which will see the transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), beginning with the application of this new model. There are two parts to the Merge, one known as Bellatrix upgrade and one known as full transition, according to the announcement that first part is scheduled for Sept. 6 and the rest between Sept. 10 and Sept. 20.
There has been a huge announcement regarding Ethereum’s biggest event of the year. In a blog post published by the Ethereum Foundation, key dates related to the long-anticipated merge have been announced.
As stated in the announcement, the Merge is only going to become operational once the Bellatrix upgrade is activated on the Beacon Chain, which is scheduled to take place on Sept. 6. Upon the activation of the Bellatrix upgrade on the Beacon Chain, Ethereum will begin its transition from PoW to PoS on september 10 until september 20, once the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) value triggering The Merge reaches 58750000000000000000000.
The Merge is a two-step process. The first step is a network upgrade, Bellatrix, on the consensus layer triggered by an epoch height. This is followed by the execution layer’s transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, Paris, triggered by a specific Total Difficulty threshold called the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD).
In the post, it was explained that TTD reaches the specified value based on the PoW hash rate. Once the new block is created, a Beacon Chain validator will complete the Merge transition. It will generally occur two epochs (or 13 minutes) after the first post-TTD block is generated, according to the blog post.
On the Ethereum mainnet, the Ethereum Foundation has also created a list of client releases that support the Merge on the Ethereum network. However, the team noted that in order to remain on the network and remain on the execution layer (EL) after the transition, node operators will have to run both the execution layer client and the consensus layer client.
As the biggest development in crypto this year, the Merge is less than a month away. In addition to reducing Ethereum’s energy usage and carbon emissions by 99%, this upgrade will also increase its scalability and efficiency.
As a result of the move to proof-of-stake, Ethereum will no longer rely on miners to mine, but will instead rely on validators to handle transactions instead. In order to earn a chance to create a block, users can stake ETH to earn a chance to do so. The stake size will determine which user will become a validator, and one of them will be selected based on the stake size.
