Mergers Will Come Sooner: Ethereum Developers Bring Up Merge Dates

The ethereum merger, which will transition the ethereum blockchain to proof-of-stake (PoS), may come sooner than planned after core developers announced September 15 as a tentative merge date.

Core developers including Tim Beiko and Prysmatic Labs co-founder Terence Tsao agreed on Thursday’s developer call that the ethereum mainnet merge date is when the total terminal difficulty (TTD) reaches 587,500,000,000,000,000.

Beiko confirmed the news in a GitHub submission on Thursday titled "Tentative Mainnet TTD."

While the exact date and TTD are still subject to change, the success of the various testnet mergers could indicate that the ethereum mainnet is promising a smooth transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus next month.

The newly announced official merger time is at least three days earlier than the September 19th predicted by Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko.

Tentative Mainnet TTD
58750000000000000000000
NOTE: Nothing is final until the client release, so please expect last minute changes due to unforeseen circumstances https://t.co/PQ0YOKpk1u
— terence.eth (@terencechain) August 11, 2022

The lengthy number provided is called Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD), and refers to when Proof-of-Work (PoW) ends and Proof-of-Stake begins. TTD is the total difficulty required for the last block that will be mined before transitioning to PoS.

Before the merger can be completed, a Bellatrix fork must take place, which will deploy the software required by clients to run the consensus layer. This was scheduled for September 6, about 10 days before the merger.

On Thursday, the Goerli testnet became the last testnet to successfully transition to PoS, following the Sepolia merger on July 7 and the Ropsten merger on June 9.

After the merger, the energy consumption of the Ethereum network is expected to drop by more than 99.99%, it will also be able to resist attacks on the network, and the scalability will also be improved.

PoW miners will stick to the PoW chain

However, it has been rumored that many Ethereum miners who rely on PoW block rewards to generate income will continue to run the original PoW version of Ethereum in order to preserve their earning potential.

Bitcoin and Ethereum miner, cryptocurrency angel investor Chandler Guo is a strong supporter of the PoW chain and is leading miners to fork the Ethereum network to create the Ethereum PoW (ETHW) chain. Guo seemed to think there was enough room in the industry for two ethereums to exist, retweeting a series of arguments in support of the concept.

He vowed to release the code needed to execute the ETH PoW fork to bypass the difficulty bomb, a mechanism that drastically reduces block rewards for miners to discourage them from trying to produce more blocks. The mainnet merger will happen right after the difficulty bomb.