Ethereum's merge may be coming sooner than expected

Ethereum's testnet Goerli on Wednesday transitioned to Proof of Stake (PoS), indicating completion of the third and final step before Ethereum’s existing PoW is completely done away with. 

The upgrade from Proof of work (PoW) to a Proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is known as Ethereum merge. This process has been postponed more than once to a successful implementation.

Many industry experts in the blockchain community took to Twitter to confirm that this merge is scheduled to occur on September 15 or September 16. News about the merge’s potential completion as early as September sent the prices of Ether to a two-month high. As per CoinMarketCap, Ether has rallied by 13% in 24 hours hitting highs of $20,749,915,290.

Ethereum educator and cybersecurity professional Anthony Sassano took to Twitter to confirm about the merge.

Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder of Ethereum scaling solutions, Polygon took to Twitter to announce the date.

Lex Fridman, Research Scientist at MIT expressed that "merge is an important moment in history of crypto."

Merge Impact

On August 8, Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin while addressing the Korea Blockchain Week 2022, an annual industry event that has taken place since 2018 stated that the transition from Proof of work (PoW) to a Proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism would reduce the gas fees. 

“In the future, with rollups, with all of the improvements to efficiency, the transaction costs could go down to US$0.05 or even be as low as 0.2 cents,” he said. 

This Merge is expected to make the Ethereum blockchain faster, more scalable, and much more energy efficient. Ethereum’s lack of energy efficiency has long been a complaint among environmentalists, who have argued that the blockchain consumes a large chunk of energy in order to function.