Ethereum Dev: Merger Will Happen in August 'If All Goes to Plan'

Ethereum’s long-awaited migration to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which has been delayed time and time again, appears to be happening sometime in August. hope so.

Preston Van Loon, a core developer on the ethereum network, told attendees at the Permissionless conference that if all goes according to plan, the transition, known as The Merge, will happen sometime in August.

Van Loon told the 5,000 attendees that the team wanted to complete the transition before the so-called "difficulty bomb" slowed network performance as planned.

“As far as we know, if everything goes according to plan, the merger will happen in August. If we don’t need to move the [difficulty bomb], let’s do it as soon as possible.”

That sentiment was echoed by ethereum researcher Justin Drake, who said that ensuring the merger happens quickly is a top priority, saying he "strongly hopes to get this done before the August difficulty bomb."

A "difficulty bomb" is a program programmed into the Ethereum blockchain that intentionally slows down the network. Its purpose is to encourage the transition to PoS, making it harder for miners to stay on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain after a merger.

On April 11, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko announced that the merger had been delayed again. Despite the success of the “shadow fork test,” Beiko said the merge would not be deployed in June as expected. Beiko stated that developers need to act fast to avoid the difficulty bomb, or they will need to introduce another update to delay the difficulty bomb.

“If client developers decide they cannot deploy the merge to mainnet before block times are slowed down too much, then another delay will be required.”

Ahead of the recommitment to the timeline, the ethereum network hit a "huge testing milestone" this week with the Ropsten testnet merger set to take place on June 8. The Ropsten testnet merger will see the PoW testnet combined with the new PoS consensus layer testnet. It will simulate what would happen if Ethereum and the Beacon Chain truly merge and become a PoS network.

If the merger is successfully deployed in August, the last milestone on the ethereum roadmap, the shard chain upgrade is expected to go live in early 2023. Until then, however, the Ethereum network will continue to leverage layer-2 networks like Polygon and Optimism to handle scalability and high transaction volumes.

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