Following agreement among developers on a potential date for the mainnet Merge, Ethereum’s switch to proof-of-stake is becoming nearer.
It appears that the Ethereum Merge, which will see the blockchain switch to proof-of-stake on September 15, will happen sooner than anticipated (PoS).
The Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) threshold of 58750000000000000000000, as agreed upon in a Thursday developer call by core devs, including Tim Beiko and Terence Tsao of Prysmatic Labs, is when the Ethereum mainnet Merge date will occur.
This was verified in a GitHub post titled “Tentative mainnet TTD,” which was added on Thursday by Beiko.
The success of the different testnet mergers, even though the precise time and TTD may still be altered, may indicate that the Ethereum mainnet will smoothly switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus the next month.
The new official timeline is at least three days earlier than the date of September 19, predicted by Tim Beiko, an Ethereum core developer.
Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD), the lengthy number given, indicates when proof-of-work (PoW) will stop and when proof-of-stake will start. The total needed difficulty (TTD) for the last block must be mined before switching to PoS.
Prior to the Merge, the Bellatrix fork must be carried out, which will put the necessary software in place for clients to run the consensus layer. This is planned to occur on September 6, around ten days before the Merge.
Following the Sepolia merge on July 7 and Ropsten on June 9, the Goerli testnet became the final testnet to complete its own switch to PoS on Friday.
The energy use of the Ethereum network is anticipated to decrease by more than 99.99% following the Merge. It can fend against network threats, and scalability will increase.
PoW Miners Must Persevere
There are rumors, however, that Ether (ETH) miners will still use the original PoW version of Ethereum to maintain their earning potential. Many Ether (ETH) miners rely on the cash produced through PoW block rewards.
The movement to fork the Ethereum network and create an Ethereum PoW (ETHW) chain is being led by Chandler Guo, a Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum miner and crypto angel investor who is an apparent supporter of PoW chains. Guo has retweeted several comments in favor of the idea and appears to believe there is space in the market for two forms of Ethereum.
He has promised to make the code necessary to carry out an ETH PoW fork that avoids the difficulty bomb. This feature dramatically lowers the block reward for miners to discourage them from attempting to produce any more blocks. The difficulty bomb and mainnet merge will happen simultaneously.
On Poloniex, ETHW is currently trading at $72.5, down around 7.5% from the previous day. In the meantime, CoinGecko reports that ETH has increased 1.5% over the last 24 hours to $1,881.54.