Merge remains change of consensus mechanism
Sickness, biggest update The history of Ethereum, which will turn the cryptocurrency into a proof-of-stake consensus, is almost complete.
The final testnet, Goerli, was successfully merged over the past week. The expected TTD, or timeline for the mainnet merge, which was confirmed by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, was given by Ethereum engineers as Sept. 15 or 16.
Thereafter, the price of Ethereum returned to the $2,000 mark as optimism increased.
In the face of great expectations, the Ethereum team is out to debunk some common “misconceptions” about the merge. Some of these include assumptions that the Merge will reduce gas fees or lead to downtime for the chain, among several others.
“Merge” may not result in lower gas charges
According to the Ethereum team, the upcoming merge update is unlikely to result in lower gas charges. It was noted that the merge is a change of the consensus mechanism, not an expansion of the network capacity.
It states that gas prices are the result of network demand in relation to network capacity. While switching from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus, the Merge does not dramatically alter any factors that directly affect network throughput or capacity.
It provides an indication of how it aims to solve costly gas charges: “With a rollup-focused roadmap, on layer 2 while enabling the Layer 1 mainnet as a secure decentralized settlement layer optimized for rollup data storage.” The focus is on increasing user activity. To help make roll-up transactions increasingly affordable.” The transition to proof of stake is an important precursor to realizing this.
Another misconception it sought to debunk was that the Merge would solve current network congestion, with the assumption that “transactions will be noticeably faster after The Merge.” It stated that this may not be true as transaction speed will mostly be the same on Layer 1. It states that some slight changes may occur in time to be included in a block and time to finalization, which determine transaction speed, but this may not be noticeable to users.
Other misconceptions, such as on-chain downtime due to the merge and the withdrawal of staked ETH, were also addressed.
At the time of publication, Ethereum was trading at $1,890.
