Dawn is Coming: Ethereum Merger Is Just Around the Corner

• Last week, the merger was successfully implemented on the Ethereum test network Ropsten, and PoS was officially enabled on Ropsten;

• The merger on the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will take place in a few weeks;

• If all goes well, the Ethereum mainnet merger is expected to be executed in late August to November;

• To coordinate with the final mainnet The Merge, EIP-5133 proposes to restart the mainnet’s difficulty bomb in August;

• As the second-layer expansion plan matures, Ethereum’s focus has shifted from building shard chains to supporting the merger of the main network and the beacon chain. Shard chains are expected to be supported in 2023.

In the past few years, we have seen a lot of heated discussions in the community about PoW and PoS. But no matter what, one established fact is that Ethereum, the largest ecological network in the crypto world today, will soon migrate from PoW to PoS. With the successful completion of the merger on the Ropsten test network, the community is more confident about this.

Ropsten Merge

In the early morning of June 9, 2022, Beijing time, the Ethereum test network Ropsten successfully completed the merger. Ropsten was launched in 2016 and is the longest-running Ethereum test network to date. According to Ethereum core developers, about 14% of validators experienced downtime during the Ropsten merger, but most of them were caused by incorrect node configurations, and these problems were quickly resolved. In addition, the merger on Ropsten is considered to be nearly perfect and has become an important milestone in Ethereum's migration to PoS.

The merge will be performed on the Sepolia (about 3 weeks later) and Goerli (about 6 weeks later) test networks in the future. If all goes well, the Ethereum mainnet is expected to complete the merge between late August and November.

Although it has been criticized for its environmental protection and energy consumption, PoW is the consensus algorithm with the longest stable operation time. In comparison, PoS has not yet experienced a long period of testing. Especially for a huge ecosystem like Ethereum, what potential impacts will there be after migrating to PoS is a question we have to consider.

It is also crucial for Ethereum developers to ensure that their applications can function normally after the merger. According to the official Ethereum statement, the merger has minimal impact on the contract subset, but considering the potential impact on other components such as the front end and tools, developers are advised to perform a complete test and deployment cycle on Ropsten and provide timely feedback on issues.

The road to merger

The characteristics of an ideal blockchain include: sufficient transaction bandwidth, decentralization and security, and good energy efficiency. In order to achieve these goals, Ethereum has planned to upgrade the consensus mechanism of PoS, as well as expansion based on Layer2 and Sharding. The Merge that recently occurred in Ropsten is an important upgrade for Ethereum to solve energy efficiency and improve decentralization and security.

There are two key nodes for Ethereum to achieve energy efficiency by migrating from PoW to PoS, namely the Beacon Chain and The Merge .

Beacon Chain

The beacon chain supports nodes to become validators of the network by staking Ethereum tokens. The beacon chain is the consensus layer foundation network of Ethereum PoS and was officially launched in December 2020.

Before The Merge, the beacon chain and the actual execution layer were separated from each other. The state of the PoS consensus layer was maintained by the nodes in the beacon chain alone, but was not actually used by the blockchain. The state of the execution layer was maintained by the PoW mining nodes, which actually served as the consensus layer.

The Merge:

The Merge will enable the beacon chain as the consensus layer network for Ethereum blocks, replacing the consensus mechanism that was actually controlled by the PoW node network. The third block in the figure below is the key point of The Merge: the state of the execution layer in this block is inherited from the original PoW network, while the state of the consensus layer is inherited from the PoS network. After that, Ethereum will smoothly switch to the PoS consensus mechanism.

Ethereum has designed a difficulty bomb mechanism to assist the switch from PoW to PoS. After the difficulty bomb is activated, the mining difficulty of the PoW network will increase exponentially and eventually freeze. As can be seen from the figure below, there have been three times in the history of Ethereum where the difficulty bomb has increased the difficulty of producing blocks.

After completing the Ropsten merger, Ethereum will proceed along the path to launch the mainnet merger. According to EIP-5133, the difficulty bomb used to assist the Ethereum mainnet The Merge will be launched in August 2022.

It is worth adding that the goal of The Merge Ethereum upgrade is to switch the consensus mechanism, which will not have a direct impact on tps. In the L2-centered expansion roadmap, the protocol layer is mainly used to ensure decentralization and security, and the task of expansion will be mainly undertaken by sharding and L2.

Conclusion