After a 'Few Months,' Ethereum Merge Dev Explains What's Going on in June

Not in June, but in the next several months. According to Tim Beiko, a developer of Ethereum's PoW, "We're clearly in the closing phase of PoW on Ethereum."

There's yet another delay in the long-awaited Ethereum Merge. Developers are working on the updated estimate that the upgrade will be completed in June.

There was a general belief that the Merge would be completed before the end of the year because of the success of the testing. Since proof-of-stake (PoS) has been repeatedly postponed since it was initially suggested, the current setback is anticipated.

However, there are encouraging signals that Ethereum mainnet may join the Beacon Chain this year and create a proof-of-stake network. For real, this time around.

According to Ethereum engineer Tim Beiko on Twitter, the core developers are nearing the end of their work on the protocol.

Not in June, but in the next several months. The last phase of PoW on Ethereum has yet to be determined, but we're undoubtedly in the final phase."

"It may be hard to discern the development of The Merge when you aren't deep in the process," Beiko said today in response to the controversy sparked by his earlier statements.

Beiko went into further detail about the situation in her blog article, seen here.

Until "client teams are certain the software implementations have indeed been properly tested and are bug-free," a particular date cannot be specified, according to the developer.

For testing different merge/PoS methods, developers will be able to use public testnets like Kiln and shadow forks, which are currently being rolled out.

Bombs that are hard to detonate

It's also vital to consider the difficulty bomb, which Beiko claims will begin to appear on Ethereum in May and make blocks "unbearably (read 15-20 seconds) sluggish by August."

According to him, "If user developers do not believe they can deliver The Merge to mainnet until block times go down too much, it will have to be postponed again."

There are two methods to postpone the difficulty bomb such that the Merge upgrade may be activated before the "bomb at a given block, restore 13s block timings, and then trigger The Merge soon after," according to Beiko.

Before merging, it is necessary to isolate the bomb delay through a network update "which just delays the difficulty bomb."

"The Merge will not be initiated by a block time, as has been the case with prior Ethereum upgrades. As a result, it will instead be activated by the overall difficulty level. Due to the difficulty of predicting block durations, the interval between picking a period for The Merge and it becoming live on the system may be shorter than earlier Ethereum upgrades."

Parithosh Jayanthi, a developer at the Ethereum Foundation, said earlier this week that "bugs ranging from synchronization code to demand timeouts were detected" during the evaluation of three shadow forks.

Eth2's last milestone on its road plan will be the sharded chains upgrade, which is scheduled to be live in early 2023, after the successful deployment of The Merge and move to a PoS consensus mechanism. For now, the network will use layer-2 networks such as Optimism and Polygon for scalability and substantial transaction volumes.

In the last 30 days, the value of Ether (ETH) has risen sharply, rising 20.5 percent to $3,126 at the time of this writing.

Source: Cointelegraph News