The Merge has officially transitioned Ethereum from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.
On September 15th, 06:42:42 UTC, the crypto community held their breath when the long-awaited Ethereum transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake occurred.
The complete Ethereum Merge happened in two stages, “Bellatrix” and “Paris”.
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On September 6th, the “Bellatrix” stage updated the network on the consensus layer, which was triggered by epoch height. The second and last stage, “Paris”, occurred on September 15th, when the Ethereum Mainnet execution layer merged with the Beacon Chain’s consensus layer. It happened when the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD), reached 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000.
With the transition to Proof-of-Stake, Ethereum is set to reduce its energy consumption by 99.95%, provide a faster speed for transaction confirmations, increase security, and gain the ability to add more scaling solutions.
According to sources, Ethereum Foundation has been working for several years to launch The Merge. However, the work doesn’t stop here. The team behind Ethereum are looking forward to increasing its technical abilities in a few stages, “Surge”, “Verge”, “Purge”, and “Splurge.”
The Surge aims to increase rollup scalability using sharding. The Verge will use Verkle trees to achieve statelessness. Afterward, the Purge will remove technical debt and historical data. Lastly, Splurge will provide small updates to the whole ecosystem.
Despite the work ahead, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterein used Twitter to share his excitement about the finalized Merge.
It is worth noting that hours before the Merge, Ether (ETH) faced a huge $1.2 billion cumulative inflow from crypto wallets to crypto exchanges.
Reportedly, cryptocurrency lender Nexo deposited 450,000 ETH (worth around $720 million) to crypto exchange Binance. On top of that, Multisig crypto wallet's owner deposited 288,442 ETH to crypto exchange Bitfinex.
There are many speculations about why such actions were taken. It is assumed that one of the reasons why Ethereum coins were moved to crypto exchanges is because depositors aim to collect Ethereum forked token ETHW in an airdrop.
