ETH’s shift to Proof-of-Stake might be in the cards a few months after June.
Ethereum core developer Preston Van Loon announced that “The Merge", the move from PoW to PoS, is expected to be completed within the next three months.
During the Permissionless conference, Van Loon stated that:
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“As far as we know, if everything goes to plan, August — it just makes sense. If we don’t have to move [the difficulty bomb], let’s do it as soon as we can.”
“The Merge” is anticipated to reduce ETH supply by around 90%.
ETH Foundation’s Justin Drake also mentioned that one of the primary concerns as of now is to launch “The Merge” as fast as possible by noting that there is a “strong desire to make this happen before difficulty bomb in August.”
Web3 investor Benjamin Cohen shared the news on the event and provided several comments on his Twitter account:
In fact, there is something special about August. To postpone the "difficulty bomb," ETH core devs intentionally chose not to update the network in early May. This time, core devs agreed on not "running" from “The Merge”, which is under testing now.
On top of that, even though both PoS and PoW have their own benefits, the former consensus offers some additional perks. For instance, it uses less energy, but most importantly, it will ensure simpler participation in providing further decentralization and extra security, as well as managing the network.
“The difficulty bomb” is a blockchain-encoded piece that purposely slows down the network. This element was “planted” in order to encourage devs to move on with PoS while at the same time making it harder for miners to lag behind on the PoW chain after the shift.
“The Merge” is a shift where the current ETH Mainnet will merge with the beacon chain Proof-of-Stake system while putting an end to Proof-of-Work. This way, the network will move from mining to staking.
If the shift is successfully executed this summer, the sharded chains update, which is scheduled to launch next year, will be the last milestone on ETH's roadmap.
In other news, on May 16, Cloudflare announced that it would launch Ethereum validator nodes in the midst of “The Merge”. However, no exact date of when these staked ETH validator nodes would be initiated was stated.
