Tim Beiko, an ETH core developer, in a blog post, elaborated on the much-awaited ‘The Merge’ which is supposed to happen in late 2022. He said the transitioning of ‘Ethereum to proof-of-stake is now clearly insight.’
Finally, it looks like “The Merge” will finally be released near the end of 2022. After months of speculation and backlash, the Ethereum Foundation is looking to have a path to release.
The Foundation now needs to test out mainnet shadow forks without issues, approval for merge suites, and smooth deployment across existing testnets. Once all of them are confirmed and approved, they will finally move on to the mainnet.
What are these steps and are they necessary?
Shadow forks are the first step required for Foundation approval. They allow developers to observe client performance under conditions close to public networks. Several phantom forks from Goerli as well as two from the mainnet have been deployed. Another fork called MSF3 is expected to launch this week.
The Merge is the biggest upgrade in the history of Ethereum and therefore requires new infrastructure to test cross-layer interactions. The Foundation has carried out many testing tools built by the entire Ethereum community including the clients as well. The Foundation will then await the results of the above steps before deploying the Merge to the existing public testnets. Finally, the process of transitioning the Ethereum mainnet to proof-of-stake will be like the process followed for testnets.
But before ‘The Merge’ takes place, the Foundation has to deal with long-standing issues such as gas costs.
Buterin looking for an ETH gas fees solution
The problem of Ethereum’s gas fees has again come to the fore after Vitalik Buterin’s latest comments. Since last year’s boom of the DeFi projects and the NFT industry, ETH transactions have been very high.
Ryan Adams, founder of Mythos Capital and co-founder of the Bankless podcast tweeted in favor of ETH. He said fees have come down over time while calling for a vote in support of blockchain.
On the other hand, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin then commented on the post and pushed for measures to reduce transaction fees. He said that the transactions need to be under ‘$0.05 to be truly acceptable’ while suggesting solutions for it. Buterin lamented on the application of proto- danksharding which should help with the gas fees.
