The Ethereum Merge Successfully Activated

The Ethereum Merge Successfully Activated

Ethereum’s most significant upgrade just took effect, in what industry experts are calling a game changer for the entire crypto sector. 

And we finalized! Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today said Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin on Twitter.

Ethereum has transitioned smoothly to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) with the successful joining of the Mainnet and Beacon Chain. The Merge was triggered by Terminal Total Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000 at block 15537393 on September 15 at 06:42:42. After the finalization, the first PoS block reward reached a high of 45.03 ETH. At the current price, it is worth over $72,000.

Developers reported that nearly 95% of nodes and validators have participated in the Merge. The remaining 4-5% offline nodes and validators will possibly upgrade soon. The Ethereum Foundation said the Merge will make the Ethereum network about 99.95% more energy efficient and will set the stage for future scaling solutions, including sharding. 

Ethereum Merge explained

The Merge is simply a way of doing things differently. Basically, instead of continuing to use an energy-intensive mechanism, the platform will replace it with an eco-friendly transaction validation system. It will therefore move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which swaps out miners for validators.

In proof-of-stake, the validators leverage their existing cache of ether as a means to verify transactions and mint new tokens. Since many computers no longer have to compete through complex mathematical puzzles for the right to verify transactions, the system's energy consumption will decrease drastically, and experts say it will make the protocol both more secure and more sustainable. 

What happens next?

The Merge doesn’t immediately make ETH faster, cheaper, or more scalable, but those features come with future upgrades that are now possible post-merge. 

The next steps in the Ethereum Roadmap are the Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge phases. The Surge will increase scalability for rollups through sharding, the Verge will achieve statelessness through Verkle trees, the Purge will eliminate historical data and technical debt, and the Splurge will involve some small miscellaneous upgrades. 

The Merge will result in a significantly reduced supply of ether tokens in circulation, which could pave the way for ether to become a deflationary currency in the weeks and months ahead. Some investors say this could also help drive up the price of the token.

According to OkLink, the number of active addresses on the Ethereum network has increased by 53,011 in the last 24 hours. With the increase of over 10% of active addresses, the current daily active addresses are 586,606.

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