Ethereum is set to register a major milestone on June 8 with its long-awaited ETH 2.0 network upgrade – the Ropsten public testnet. It will undergo an upgrade to the proof-of- stake(PoS) consensus. The configuration code for upgrading the testnet appeared on Monday in a pull request from Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathi in the network’s GitHub repository.
The developers working on The Merge, last month, began testing how the switch would work on a shadow fork. But two days later, Ethereum Foundation developer Tim Beiko tweeted that the upgrade had been deferred to the latter half of 2022. He said it will be a few months after June. Beiko didn’t share any dates but confirmed that the developers are definitely in the final chapter of proof-of-work (PoW) on Ethereum.
The Merge will bring about the end of PoW mining on the Ethereum network. Mining involves the use of high-end, energy-intensive computers to solve complex mathematical puzzles. This is how new Ether coins are created and how transactions are verified on the network. With the move to PoS, miners will be replaced by validators who stake ETH to validate and secure the network. The miners are rewarded in ETH.
PoS is expected to significantly reduce the amount of energy consumed by the Ethereum blockchain. Moreover, it will reduce new ETH issuance by around 90%. Analysts say this could add deflationary pressure to Ethereum, that is, if demand for the asset remains high. With the merge around the corner, the Ethereum Foundation has put in place rewards from its bug bounty program which was launched in 2021. It offers payouts in a tiered system. There are higher rewards to find critical vulnerabilities that can potentially impact the network.
Furthermore, bounty hunters can now earn up to $250,000 payable in ETH or DAI for detecting vulnerabilities that are in the scope of the program.
