Ethereum developer says that the Merge is likely to be delayed

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko said that the Merge is likely to be postponed to Q3 of 2022. He tweeted that he “strongly suggests not investing more in mining equipment at this point.” as Ethereum works towards transitioning to the proof-of-stake consensus model. 

The Merge is Ethereum’s long-anticipated transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to PoS. And will improve scalability with its ability to process transactions of up to 100,000 per second, a huge leap from the current 30 transactions per second. Bitcoin.com News reported that Ethereum’s hashrate reached an all-time high (ATH) at 1.131 petahash per second (PH/s). Today, it reached another ATH at 1.148 PH/s.

After the Merge, the Ether that has been locked or staked in the Beacon chain in 2020 will be unlocked. The switch from the energy-intensive PoS to PoW will make ether “more scalable, more secure, and more sustainable”, according to the Ethereum organization.

According to a tweet by Marius van der Wijden on April 11,  “the shadow fork” was “a huge success”. The shadow fork is a test created by Ethereum developers to copy data from the Ethereum’s mainnet network to a testnet, “a way to stress test assumptions around syncing and growth”. The tests emulates the actual Merge on a subnet of nodes that functions like the mainnet with the same blockchain history and is working to process mainnet transactions on the “shadow fork”. This is viewed by the developers and the community as “the final chapter” of Ethereum’s multi-stage process to transition to the Merge.

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