The difficulty bomb is anticipated to cut the ETH network's energy consumption by up to 99.99%
On June 10, during the Ethereum core devs meeting, the implementation of the difficulty bomb was delayed for two months in order to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time”. The upgrade is expected to fire up at the end of June.
The difficulty bomb refers to the increasing difficulty of mining on Ethereum with a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus. It’s a part of the gradual shift to ETH 2.0 that uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Thus, the ultimate aim of the difficulty bomb is to discourage miners from generating blocks under the PoW mechanism.
Did you know?
Want to get smarter & wealthier with crypto?
Subscribe - We publish new crypto explainer videos every week!
What is Yield Farming in Crypto? (Animated Explanation)
Moreover, after delaying the difficulty bomb five times before, the proposal dubbed EIP-5133 was moved once more to August. According to various sources, the shift from PoW to PoS is expected to cut the ETH network’s energy needs significantly - by up to 99.99%.
In addition, Ben Edgington, Ethereum's core developer, founder, and product lead of the Teku Eth2 client, has added:
“So, we will push back the Ethereum difficulty bomb. We say it won't delay the Merge. I sincerely hope not.”
Earlier in June, ETH’s Ropsten testnet successfully ran through “The Merge” and shifted from Proof-of-Stake (PoS) which will provide the platform with even more opportunities to grow.
In other news, back in May, OpenEthereum, one of Ethereum’s most dedicated clients, decided to terminate software support due to the upcoming “Merge.” The company also implied that the support has reached a standstill and the “usefulness has run its course.”
On top of that, various statistics still display that Ethereum’s network is growing even though the crypto market is still in turmoil. For instance, the daily operations have remained over one million as 198 million wallets are currently stored on Ethereum (ETH), displaying an almost 15-time increase since 2017.
At the time of writing, ETH price is down by 8.76% in the past 24 hours trading at $1,332 with a 24-hour trading volume of $28,919,640.
