Ethereum to Now Merge in September – Trustnodes

Ethereum is set to upgrade to full Proof of Stake (PoS) in mid-September according to a timeline given during the developers’ public meeting.

Tim Beiko, the call coordinator, proposed the final testnet Goerli can be merged later next month.

In a dev call on August 18th, the devs are then to plan for the mainnet Merge after years of development.

The first phase is Bellatrix, the Merge specification, in early September, with the merge itself to occur two weeks later, “week of Sept 19th,” the meeting notes say.

“Please regard this as a planning timeline,” a community manager said, rather than definitive dates.

However, the Ropesten testnet merge last month went without a hitch, suggesting the protocol is ready to go live.

This will be the biggest upgrade in eth and arguably in all of the crypto space since bitcoin launched now nearing 14 years ago.

That’s both on a technical level as eth transitions from energy heavy mining gear to voting stake through eth units of account, as well as where the nature of eth as an asset itself is concerned.

Because ethereum will finally reach predictable monetary parameters whereby new issuance is algorithmically set through the protocol and will no longer change, with it estimated to amount to about 0.22% of total supply, or 2,000 eth a day. That’s far less than the 14,000 eth currently given to miners every day.

Much of that ◊2,000 given to stakers might be taken out by the protocol through burning network fees, leading to the supply no longer quite increasing, and might even decrease.

In addition, the Beacon PoS chain has within it the sharding ‘skeleton’. Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s co-founder, says:

“‘PoS doesn’t help scaling’ is overstated. It does somewhat:

* No Poisson process -> no linear uncle rates -> higher gaslimits safer; similar gains to Bitcoin NG ideas
* Allows committees, which are needed for sharding (incl dank-)
* Finality -> higher gaslimits safer.”

Full sharding for now is taking second place to Layer 2 development, but after the Merge, focus will turn to data sharding which can increase the efficiency of L2s.

Thereafter, development may take up on full sharding as well where you parallelize transaction processing so that rather than all nodes processing all transactions, some of the nodes process some of the transactions in unison.

If that full sharding upgrade ever come, it will top the current one. But until then, and for now, we’re just two months away from a transformation of ethereum in both form and substance as an investment asset.