Coinbase is starting its preparation to greet the long-awaited Ethereum upgrade.
Coinbase, an American cryptocurrency exchange established in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, has announced its plans to temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens during September’s Ethereum Merge.
According to the blog post shared on August 16th, this temporary pause of transactions will allow the crypto exchange to ensure that the upgrade is successfully reflected in Coinbase's system.
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When talking about the “brief pause”, Coinbase Product Manager Armin Rezaiean-Asel notes:
Although the Merge is expected to be seamless from a user perspective, this downtime allows us to ensure that the transition has been successfully reflected by our systems. We do not expect any other networks or currencies to be impacted and expect no impact to trading for ETH and ERC-20 tokens across our centralized trading products.
Coinbase also warns users about possible scams. The company highlights that the proposals to upgrade Ethereum (ETH) to ETH2 are malicious and misleading. Crypto exchange emphasizes that ETH2 token doesn’t exist and adds:
Your assets will be safe and secure during this period and no action is required to upgrade on your part.
"The Merge" is a long-awaited Ethereum upgrade, which will shift “protocol’s consensus mechanisms” from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). According to data, this transition will lower the protocol’s energy consumption by 95%.
Coinbase adds that this transition will make Ethereum “more secure, less energy-intensive, and better for implementing new scaling solutions.”
According to the blog post, Ethereum upgrade is set to be launched around September 15th. One of the co-founders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, used Twitter to confirm this news.
In other news, Coinbase has recently collaborated with investment management corporation BlackRock to allow its users to access digital asset markets by connecting them to Coinbase Prime.
