The Merge, the process by which Ethereum updated its software for a more environmentally responsible one, ended today at 8:42 a.m. Spanish time, at block height 15537393 . From then on, Ethereum said goodbye to mining and welcomed transactions validated with proof of stake (PoS) through staking.
“The merger will reduce global electricity consumption by 0.2%, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and the most visible face of this blockchain, has tweeted.” Ethreum 2.0 will consume 99.9% less energy, according to estimates by the Ethereum Foundation.
Ethereum Fusion
This is undoubtedly good news for all corporations and institutions that want to invest in ETH(erc20 token development), offer staking services to their clients or build decentralized applications on the network. The high energy consumption of Ethereum made it incompatible with the Sustainable Development Goals. In fact, it was one of the main problems faced by companies that wanted to bet on Ethereum.
The Swiss bank Seba announced the provision of staking services on ETH 2.0 for institutional clients days before the merger took place. Binance US, the United States division of Binance exchange, also offered staking for ETH with high returns before the Merge. Staking is the way to obtain passive returns by leaving your cryptocurrencies in deposit.
Happy merging everyone. This is a great time for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merger a reality should feel very proud today. However, for Buterin announced at the Ethereum Conference in Paris that the merger is only the first in a series of actions that will take place over the coming months. Vitalik said in Paris that with the transition to PoS, Ethereum is only 40% up to date. In fact, for the long-awaited scalability and for the reduction of transaction fees, we will have to wait.
The social network Twitter has been filled with congratulations and congratulations for all those who have collaborated in the development of the new Ethereum. Some, like the artist Beeple, who sold an NFT minted on the Ethereum network for 70 million dollars in March of last year, collects in the work The Merge the historical moment of Ethereumerc20 token generator.
Beeple Tribute
Others talk about the incredible feat of making the transition from a globally used blockchain to PoS without most end users even realizing it or having to do anything.
It should be noted that the merger has hardly had an impact on the price of Ethereum erc20 token generator. At this time it is trading at $1,586 , with a drop of 1.43% in the last 24 hours, a behavior that has disappointed more than one in the community.
Next update: Shanghai
The next Ethereum upgrade is Shanghai. The update will allow the initial stakers of the Beacon Chain, the PoS chain created in 2020, to withdraw their ETH and the commissions obtained during these two years. Shanghai will facilitate the shard chains, which will serve to provide scalability to Ethereum 2.0. It is estimated that the arrival of Shanghai to the Ethereum 2.0 testnet networks will not be before a year. In the meantime, companies will continue to push the development of Layer2 solutions, such as Polygon or Arbitrum One.
In the days leading up to the merger, the crypto community has debated at length about the pros and cons of moving to PoS. For many, it represents a setback in the decentralization of the network. To start up a validator node of those that have the power to add or veto transactions, you have to deposit 32 ETH, about 60,000 euros. If that amount is not available, there are platforms where you can deposit much less money to stake, but they are platforms controlled by private companies. An example is Lido .
The DAO and decentralization
The debate about the decentralization of Ethereum has erc20 token development company is a long-standing issue. From the very moment that the hack to The DAO occurred. It happened in June 2016, a year after the launch of Ethereum. The stolen ETH was equivalent to about 60 million dollars on that date. To invalidate the transactions, Vitalik proposed to perform a fork, something that goes against the basic principle of any public blockchain : its immutability. People opposed to the fork kept the original chain, giving rise to Ethereum Classic (ETC), which has appreciated more than 3% these days and is trading above $38.
Ethereum 2.0 has also found dissidents. A group led by ETH miner Chandler Guo, one of the key people in the Ethereum Classic hard fork, has created EthereumPoW. This is a project that has decided to keep the proof of work to preserve the original network. EthereumPoW plans to fork the network 24 hours after the mainnet merger.
Regarding the debate on the decentralization of Ethereum, Blockchain Observatory yesterday reported the increasing dependence of Ethereum on centralized cloud services for its operation. Amazon Web Services alone accommodates more than 53% of all Ethereum nodes that are currently active in hosting mode. This means a value greater than 30% of the global nodes of the network. The distribution of Ethereum nodes in hosting represents 67.95% of the entire network.
