The ‘Merge’ – the long-awaited upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain – was finally completed on September 15, marking a historic milestone in the blockchain and crypto industries. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced the launch of the merger on Twitter, calling it a “big moment” for the Ethereum ecosystem. Essentially, the Ethereum blockchain has now transitioned from its previous, power-intensive ‘proof-of-work (POW)’ mining model to an energy-efficient ‘proof-of-stake (POS)’ mining model. This upgrade has reduced the power consumption of the Ethereum blockchain by 99.95 percent.
The developers working on this merge upgrade believe that this improvement will make the Ethereum network, which is the most commercial and handles billions of dollars worth of transactions and holdings, more scalable and secure.
“And we made the final!” Buterin wrote in his Twitter post.
And we’re done!
Happy all merge. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merger happen should be very proud today.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) 15 September 2022
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was among many others in the blockchain community to welcome Ethereum’s merge upgrade.
The merger was successful. POS activated.
We’re all still here.
— CZ :large_orange_diamond: Binance (@cz_binance) 15 September 2022
A truly incredible technical feat – congrats to the Ethereum community for the merger!
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) 15 September 2022
The process of re-coding Ethereum into a POS model has been a long one, fraught with technical hurdles that have led to several delays in the launch of the merge.
Projects and blockchain companies dependent on Ethereum will now have to choose whether their operations will run exclusively on the Merge upgrade or manage this efficient version alongside the previous energy-intensive version.
OpenSea, Tether and Circle Pay – the issuer of USD Coin – have already pledged to rely on a merged version of Ethereum.
Recently, a DappRadar report alerted the crypto community to organize their Ethereum-related transactions as stablecoins and transactions supported on the Ethereum blockchain may experience some hiccups.
Meanwhile, bug bounty payouts for Ethereum can now go up to $1 million (roughly Rs. 8 crore), the blockchain’s developers said in a recent update, prompting software developers to monitor potential risks surrounding the newly launched upgrade. .
