The last few days have been full of confusion and a lack of concreteness on dates around when the Merge will eventually ship, but a member of the Ethereum team has finally cleared up the air.
Here’s when it will arrive
Core Ethereum developer Tim Beiko clarified that the upgrade would not be coming this June as initially expected in a tweet. Instead, the community should anticipate it in “the few months after.” Beiko added that the network is now “in the final chapter” of PoW. However sure, his comments can only be taken with a pinch of salt given the track record of development towards this Merge.
In a later tweet, Beiko explained that there is no official date yet, but one shall be set once all the implementations are painstakingly tested and freed of bugs. A date shall be confirmed at a point where the client teams would issue an okay.
What exactly is delaying the Merge?
The development team is currently conducting tests in terms of testnets/ shadow forks towards the migration to come. The shadow forks are run against the testnets and/or the mainnet, and as per a recent tweet by Ethereum developer, Parithosh Jayanthi, three shadow forks conducted on the Goerli testnet revealed bugs with issues, including request timeouts.
Beiko says that these matters must be fixed before the update is ready. Afterwards, testnets such as Goerli and Ropsten would be run on the Merge. If the testnets remain stable for a while, it will warrant that the upgrade can now happen on the mainnet.
In a different tweet indicating that the era of Ether mining could really be in its final days, Beiko urged that investors should rather not invest in mining rigs for the Ethereum token.
It is a huge transition
The move from proof of work to proof of stake is a high-stake process with billions of assets at play.
Unlike previous network upgrades that have been triggered by a block time, the Merge will be implemented by a total difficulty value. Being that the latter is a more difficult implementation to approximate, Beiko says, the delay to be seen between picking a time for the Merge and when it actually goes live would be shorter than in previous network updates.
Worth noting, a delay of the Merge means Ethereum could become nearly unusable around May, as the difficulty time bomb – designed to disincentivize miners by making PoW mining more strenuous– is expected to become “noticeable” by then.
Beiko suggests that the difficulty bomb could be delayed to avoid reaching such a situation where block times are deplorably slow. To achieve this, he proposed that the Merge’s client releases and bomb delay could be combined, or the bomb delay be separated via a network upgrade.
The Merge won’t solve scaling and fee issues
The biggest impact of implementing the Merge would be on environmental sustainability. That still leaves the high network fees and scaling concerns unresolved. The Ethereum Foundation has had to redirect all developer efforts into working on the PoS transition, which means delays on other roadmaps milestones.
One such is sharding, which spilled over into 2023 – the upgrade was to boost Ethereum’s throughput and bring down the fees. Until then, the network’s users must contend without the scalability sharding promised.
Notably, there seems to be contentment in Ethereum’ relinquishing’ some functionality to l2s to gain from their lower transaction fees, as the mainnet’s security will remain a constant commonality. So much that shard chains promise to power these scaling solutions to offer users lower transaction fees.
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