Ethereum Foundation Member Hints Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Merger Will Be Delayed

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The long-awaited Ethereum proof-of-stake merger may be further delayed.

Tim Beiko, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted Tuesday night that the merger will not happen in June as previously expected.

·Despite the delay, Beiko still expects the merger to happen "soon".

Tim Beiko, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, revealed that the merger of Ethereum and proof-of-stake may be delayed.

Ethereum Mergers Face More Delays

Ethereum enthusiasts may have to wait a few more months for the long-awaited merger to Proof-of-Stake.

In a Twitter thread on Tuesday night, Ethereum Foundation member Tim Beiko expressed his belief that the long-awaited update will not happen in the second quarter of 2022 as currently estimated.

“It won’t be June, but it could be in the next few months,” Beiko said, going on to assert that the current proof-of-work consensus mechanism has entered its “final chapter.” “I strongly advise against further investment in mining equipment at this time,” he said in reply to an ethereum miner named TripleSack.

Beiko revealed that the merger would be delayed, which came as no surprise to longtime Ethereum followers. Discussions about transitioning the ethereum network to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism date back to 2016, when co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he believed the transition would happen "soon." Although ethereum’s developers never gave a hard deadline for the merger, estimates have been pushed back over the years.

While Beiko's estimates now put the merger's launch date in the second half of 2022, others are skeptical. A representative of Flexpool, the sixth largest ethereum mining pool, said their organization does not believe the merger will happen until 2023. Flexpool also stated that it plans to "delay the merge further once our developers go public and do our best to find bugs." Since mining pools like Flexpool invest a lot of money in Ethereum mining, they are doing as much as possible. There is a vested interest in maintaining a proof-of-work network for a long time.

The merger refers to a planned network upgrade that combines Ethereum's proof-of-work execution layer and proof-of-stake consensus layer into a single proof-of-stake-based chain. The merger would mark the end of Ethereum, which uses an energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism to support proof-of-stake. If successful, the switch will significantly reduce the energy consumption of the network and pave the way for future Ethereum scalability updates such as sharding.