Upcoming Ethereum Hard Fork: Delayed Difficulty Bomb, No User Action Required

According to the official announcement of the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum mainnet (ETH1) will undergo a Gray Glacier hard fork upgrade at the end of June, which is the twelfth hard fork upgrade in the history of Ethereum.

There is only one proposal EIP 5133 for the Gray Glacier hard fork upgrade, the main content of which is to postpone the "difficulty bomb" for another 700,000 blocks, about 100 days to mid-September 2022; this upgrade will be carried out at block height 15050000, approximately at 18:00 on June 30th, Beijing time.

(Upgrade countdown: https://etherscan.io/block/countdown/15050000)

To cope with the upcoming upgrade, node operators or miners must download the latest version of the Ethereum client, otherwise they will be left on the old chain and will not be able to perform subsequent on-chain operations; as an Ethereum user (ETH holder), if your assets are in an exchange, web wallet, mobile wallet service, or hardware wallet, you do not need to take any action unless the exchange or wallet service notifies you to take additional steps.

At present, multiple platforms such as FTX, Binance, and OKCoin have issued announcements to remind users to complete ERC20 token transfers and other operations before the upgrade, and will suspend deposits and withdrawals on the 29th until the mainnet upgrade is completed. According to past practice, the exchange will open deposits and withdrawals within an hour after the upgrade when the network becomes stable.

Since the birth of Ethereum, the difficulty bomb has been written into the genetic sequence. The difficulty bomb is a set of codes added to the Ethereum mainnet blockchain. Once it explodes, the difficulty of Ethereum mining will increase exponentially, forcing miners to stop mining, and the entire network will eventually switch from POW to POS.

In previous hard fork upgrades, postponing the difficulty bomb was also one of the common proposals. In the "London Upgrade" in August last year, considering the possibility of ETH1 and ETH2 merging at the end of the year, the difficulty bomb was postponed to December of that year; but the actual merger progress was far below expectations, so the Arrow Glacier hard fork upgrade was carried out again in December, and the difficulty bomb was postponed again to June this year.

This Gray Glacier upgrade will postpone the difficulty bomb to September again, which is also related to the Ethereum merger (ETH1 & ETH 2) process. Currently, the merger process is only carried out on the test network, and only the Ropsten test network (June 9) has been completed. Only when the remaining two test networks (Goerli and Sepolia) transition to POS will the real main network merger begin.

According to the prediction of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, if everything goes well, the merger may take place as early as August; if other conditions arise, it may be postponed to September or October. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko said that Ethereum is expected to merge between late August and November, and only a catastrophic event or failure can prevent the merger this year; due to the technical issues involved, it is almost impossible to give an exact date for the merger to occur.

Regardless, people familiar with Ethereum are still optimistic about future mergers: Although Ethereum has been "delayed" for many years, it is finally moving steadily towards its established goals.