Bellatrix upgrade goes live

The Bellatrix upgrade went live at epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain at approximately 7:35 am ET  and is ready for the Ethereum Merge between Sept. 13 to Sept. 15.

The Ethereum node runs on two layers, the consensus layer (‘C layer’) and the execution or proof-of-work (PoS) layer. Upon reaching or exceeding the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) value of 58750000000000000000000, the Paris upgrade will be triggered between Sept. 10 to Sept 20. 

The Beacon Chain has been running in parallel as a PoS system with Ethereum mainnet. The Paris upgrade will merge the Beacon Chai with the Ethereum mainnet to combine the two chains into one unified PoS blockchain. This will mark the end of proof-of-work mining on the Ethereum blockchain and the completion of the Merge. 

“What’s happening today is the Bellatrix hard fork, which *prepares* the chain for the merge,” Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, said in a Tweet.  “Still important though — make sure to update your clients!”

Following the Paris upgrade is the Shanghai upgrade, which will allow stakers to withdraw their tokens with plans for sharding also on the agenda to enable higher scalability and network capacity on the Ethereum network.