There’s good news on Ethereum’s sixth birthday. Ethereum merge (the transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake) and Ethereum 2.0 launch requirement has been assigned an Ethereum Improvement Proposal classification – the EIP3675, core developers Mikhail Kalinin and Danny Ryan announced on July 29 via Twitter! It means that the transition is in full swing and it’s now up to core devs to further develop it and Ethereum (informal) governance process to decide upon its implementation.
EIP-3675: Upgrade consensus to Proof-of-Stake has been mergedhttps://t.co/CFIbvePijR
The merged “EIP-3675: Upgrade consensus to Proof-of-Stake” defines the Ethereum merge terminologies, requirements, and what needs to happen. It’s still likely to be modified several times as more dev work takes place – as such it’s incomplete. However, it represents a step in the right direction with developers racing to finish the transition and subsequent complete launch of Ethereum 2.0. It’s noteworthy that Ethereum is implementing the fees burning, user experience improving, and security-focused EIP1559 in the coming days also.
About Ethereum 2.0 And Ethereum Merge
Ethereum merge and the final Ethereum 2.0 implementation are the next big upgrades for the Ethereum network.. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM, and sharding. It will reduce the resources, required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.
The Eth2 upgrade will start in three phases. The first Phase 0 Beacon Chain launched on Dec 01 ’20 and introduced the staking feature. This comes after Phase 1 in Q1 2021, which will introduce sharding and allow data storage on shards, however, transactions can’t still be processed.
Phase 2 will make the Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational. This will happen after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Only after the ETH2 chain has been rolled out, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence. The Eth1 and Eth2 chains will gradually merge with each other, known as the Ethereum merge.
