On Friday, Ethereum developers announced that the difficulty bomb is delayed, a crucial step toward the highly-anticipated Merge process.
Tim Beio, the core developer, explained via a tweet published on June 11 that they wanted to ensure that they “sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time.”
The difficulty bomb will prevent the ETH mining devices from keeping their mining devices running during the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to Proof-of-stake (PoS).
This will significantly increase the difficulty for miners in verifying transitions on the network, hence reducing profitability for PoW miners. Ultimately, miners would find it difficult to validate a block. In 2016, the difficult bomb feature was added to the code in 2016, the same time discussion around the Merge becoming the Consensus layer(formerly known as ETH 2.0 began.
As per some predictions, the Ethereum network’s energy demands will be reduced by 99.9% with the network’s transition to PoS. PoS networks such as Polygon and Fantom Opera, have almost no power demands compared to other PoW networks.
Beiko acknowledged that delaying the difficulty bomb means more delay in the Merge itself, which is scheduled for August 2022.
On June 9, the Ropsten testnet on Ethereum completed its own successful merge to PoS, which developers called as the “first dress rehearsal” for the real merge.
Ethereum User Base Still Strong
However, the Ethereum user base continues to be strong even after the downturn in digital assets’ prices. Except for one day since December, the daily transactions on the network stayed above one million. Keeping a record of daily transactions provides us a simple and concise peek into the general load the network handles.
In addition, the number of unique addresses is still rising each month. The number has not slowed down since it first picked up in December 2017. As of now, there are around 198 million unique wallets on Ethereum, a 14.5-time rise since December 7, 2017.
At the time of writing, the price of ETH was trading at $1,218.17, a 7.17% decrease in the last 24 hours.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/06/13/ethereum-announces-delay-in-difficulty-bomb-networks-userbase-continues-to-expand/