The ETH network is closer to completing its merger phase of transition – from being a PoW consensus to proving PoS. Developers at ETH offered up a proposed merger date in a conference all on July 14th, 2022. During the call, Tim Beiko, who is a core developer and runs meetings, set September 19th as a tentative date. This was supposed to be the date by which the merger was to happen, and it didn’t get any push back from other developers.
ETH’s transition to becoming a PoS company began in December 2020 after Beacon Chain was launched. This was Phase Zero of the transition. The launch of Phase 1 was to begin in mid-2021 but was pushed forward to Q1 of 2022. There were plenty of unfinished tasks which included complex auditing related to coding.
In June 2022, Beacon Chain went live on the Sepolia testnet and this was a dress rehearsal for the Merge. This task would provide ETH developers many insights into technical aspects. The testnet merge was completed successfully on the 7th of July 2022.
The Merge’s final trial is set to take place on the Goerli network and scheduled for mid-August this year. After this step, the official Merge is set to take place on a priority basis in mid-September. All of these mergers are expected to make ETH a company whose energy use will drop by 99% and introduce sharding. Sharding is a process which will make the ETH network scalable in nature and put it in the same league as centralized payment processing companies.
