ETH can be mined for another 6 months, delaying the difficulty bomb until June next year

According to Ethernodes data, the Ethereum network has completed the Arrow Glacier upgrade at block height 13,773,000 at 3:55 am Beijing time today. The upgrade includes the EIP-4345 proposal, which will postpone the Ethereum difficulty bomb to June 2022.

Ethernodes data shows that as of press time, 1,896 Ethereum nodes (73%) have completed the Arrow Glacier upgrade, and the remaining 702 nodes (27%) have not yet completed the upgrade. Among them, 83% of Geth client nodes, 85% of Erigon client nodes, and 48% of Nethermind client nodes have completed the upgrade.

After the upgrade was completed, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko said on Twitter: Everything looks good, some loose nodes have not been updated, but there are no major problems. I hope this is the last time we postpone the difficulty bomb!

After the completion of the Arrow Glacier upgrade, it means that the difficulty bomb has been postponed for the fifth time. Looking back at history, the first four postponements occurred in the Byzantium upgrade (EIP-649), the Constantinople upgrade (EIP-1234), the Muir Glacier upgrade (EIP-2384), and the London upgrade (EIP-3554) that ended in August this year.

Difficulty bomb postponed to June next year

The Difficulty Bomb is a mechanism that freezes mining when the Ethereum network transitions from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). It aims to increase the difficulty of block production and thus prolong the time it takes to produce a block, with the ultimate goal of reducing the revenue from POW mining.

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko told CNBC that the difficulty bomb is intended to slow down or freeze mining activity on Ethereum. After this upgrade is completed, the difficulty bomb will be postponed to June 2022, by which time developers expect Ethereum to have switched from PoW to PoS.

Tim Beiko said: After the transition is completed, the difficulty bomb will no longer exist in the Ethereum network.

Once it successfully moves towards PoS, Ethereum will be more scalable, secure and sustainable. Tim Beiko said that the energy demand of the PoS mechanism will not be as much as POW, and Ethereum's impact on the environment will be reduced by 99%.

According to the Ethereum Foundation’s announcement last month, the reasons for the delay of the difficulty bomb are as follows: The difficulty bomb only affects the PoW network, so it only exists on the Ethereum mainnet and the Ropsten test network. With the recent progress in the transition to PoS, it was decided to temporarily postpone the detonation of the difficulty bomb on the mainnet only, and try to make a PoS transition on the Ropsten test network before the difficulty bomb is detonated.

Ethereum Moves Towards PoS

According to previous reports, Ethereum 2.0 and 1.0 are expected to merge in the second quarter of next year, which means that Ethereum will officially transition from PoW to PoS. Trenton VanEpps, the ecological construction coordinator of the Ethereum Foundation, said on the 17th of last month that Ethereum will end the PoW consensus mechanism within 3 to 6 months and called on Ethereum miners to prepare for this.

On November 29, Tim Beiko wrote an article on the official website of the Ethereum Foundation, detailing the impact of the merger on the Ethereum application layer, and pointed out that if a reorganization attack is to be carried out after the merger, 1/3 of the total staked Ether will need to be destroyed, equivalent to more than 10 billion US dollars.

The Beacon Chain, Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0, was launched on December 1, 2020. The Beacon Chain is responsible for the transition from PoW to PoS and has become the new backbone of Ethereum. Its goal is to eventually expand the network to 100,000 TPS.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on Twitter on the 2nd to celebrate the beacon chain's birthday and released an updated Ethereum roadmap, showing the current status of Ethereum protocol development and the order of future development. From the roadmap, it can be seen that the merger (TheMerge) will be the next important milestone for Ethereum.