The Ethereum POS merge is expected in September 2022 after the last Goerli testnet completed a transition to proof-of-stake in August 2022.
This latest merge follows a similar transition on the Sepolia testnet in early July 2022, and the first transition on the oldest Ropsten testnet in June 2022.
With Goerli done, Ethereum developers have projected that the merge could occur around September 15-16th, 2022, as revealed by various reports.
Among the first people to reveal the news of the finished merge were Anthony Sassano, who is an adviser at Ethereum as well as core developer Preston Van Loon. They both went on Twitter to announce the event.
According to an Ethereum blog post, the merge will occur in 2 steps as follows:
- The first is a network upgrade on the consensus layer that has been dubbed Bellatrix
- The second will be followed by the execution layer’s transition to POS, dubbed Paris
The execution layer’s transition to PoS is projected to occur in mid-September 2022.
Originally, just like Bitcoin, Ethereum was just a Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain but introduced a PoS Beacon Chain on December 1, 2020.
According to Ethereum, Proof-of-Stake comes with a number of improvements over the Proof-of-Work system:
- Better energy efficiency – You don’t need to use lots of energy mining blocks
- Lower barriers to entry, reduced hardware requirements – You don’t need elite hardware to stand a chance of creating new blocks
- Stronger immunity to centralization – Proof-of-Stake should lead to more nodes in the network
- Stronger support for shard chains – A key upgrade in scaling the Ethereum network
The Merge was initially scheduled for June 2022 but has been postponed several times as the Ethereum team needed to confirm that all tests are successful at each stage.
