Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake integration has been completed, marking a watershed moment in the history of cryptos

By: Ikenna Odunze

September 15, 2022 8:58 AM

By switching to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, Ethereum can cut its power consumption by 99.95 percent compared to a proof-of-work system.

The Ethereum network has completed its merge, ushering in the Proof of Stake era (PoS).

The long-anticipated merge between Ethereum's mainnet execution layer and Beacon Chain's consensus layer occurred on September 15 at 06:42:42 UTC, at block 15537393, with a difficulty terminal total of 5875 trillion. This means that after this block, the network will no longer rely on a proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

In addition to laying the groundwork for future scaling solutions like sharding, the Ethereum Foundation claims the merger will increase the network's energy efficiency by 99.5%.

"The immediate significance of the merger is the dramatic impact it will have on power consumption," said Eli Ben-Sasson, president and co-founder of StarkWare.

It's the "first step in a process that will lead to exceedingly widespread adoption of Ethereum," as Ben-Sasson put it.

"Changes will snowball from there. As a result, blockchain-based apps will gain popularity and more people will use Ethereum's computational power."

The Ethereum Foundation had been working toward the merger for a long time.

Now that the merger is complete, the last four phases on Ethereum's technical roadmap are "Surge," "Verge," "Purge," and "Splurge."

The Surge will implement sharding to increase rollup scalability, the Verge will use Verkle trees to achieve statelessness, the Purge will get rid of old data and technical debt, and the Splurge will include a variety of smaller updates.

Beeple, a renowned designer, drew a sci-fi image to commemorate the union.

On September 15 at 06:42:42 UTC in block 15537393, the Ethereum merge was completed, and the network switched from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake.