Ethereum’s blockchain has switched from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake with the completion of The Merge.
This is a big change as staking validators, rather than GPU miners, are now responsible for verifying transactions and adding new blocks to the Ethereum blockchain. The miners are now urged to migrate over to Proof-of-Stake, which guarantees to consume 99.95% less energy and be significantly more environmentally friendly.
After the Merge, everyone was curious to see how the first “epoch,” a collection of 32 blocks, would function in the new environment.
According to software developers present at an Ethereum Foundation viewing party, the process went “amazingly” and “perfectly,” even though a few blocks were missing.
The price of ETH didn’t change much after the Merge was announced.
According to CoinMarketCap data, it remained stable at around $1,600.
According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a live stream:
“This is the first step in Ethereum’s big journey toward being a very mature system. There are still lots of steps to go. We still have to scale, we still have to fix privacy, and we have to make the thing secure for regular users. We have to work hard and do our part to make all of these other things happen as well. To me, The Merge just symbolizes the difference between early-stage Ethereum and the Ethereum we’ve always wanted. Let’s go and build out all the other parts of that ecosystem.”
The actual time and date of The Merge were like moving targets because they were determined by hashrate and difficulty.
It eventually happened just before 3 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, making it a late night for many Ethereum supporters in the United States. Each person who viewed the Ethereum Foundation’s live stream received a POAP (or Proof of Attendance Protocol), a special NFT.
Ethereum investors have been informed that they do not need to take any further action as a result of The Merge because “ETH is ETH” and no new tokens are being created. However, some exchanges temporarily suspended Ethereum deposits and withdrawals in the minutes following the transition.
PoS has always been on Ethereum’s agenda, and the Merge has been in the works for years. Buterin previously stated that Ethereum would be 55% complete following The Merge.
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