The Ethereum Merge Countdown Begins

By: Michael Wilson

September 7, 2022 6:20 AM

Once the Bellatrix upgrade is enabled on the Ethereum blockchain, the Merge will begin and should be finished between September 13 and 16.

Merge, a major upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain, has officially begun and is expected to go live between September 13 and 16. With the activation of the Bellatrix upgrade on Tuesday, Ethereum finally began its long-awaited transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).

The Bellatrix upgrade readies the Ethereum mainnet's Execution layer for a Merge with the Ethereum PoS Beacon Chain (also known as the Consensus layer).

With an expected start time of 11:35 UTC, the activation took place at epoch 144896.

Our TTD value for the Merge is 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000. The total difficulty of all Ethereum blocks mined is expected to reach this value between September 13 and 16. It is currently expected to occur around September 15th.

To continue the chain with a new system for issuing and authenticating blocks of transactions, the network will merge its Execution layer with the new PoS Consensus layer when the TTD is reached.

At the time of the Merge, Ethereum's PoW network difficulty will have increased to the point where new blocks cannot be mined.

The Beacon Chain was unveiled in December of 2020, making the Merge a long time in coming.

The third and final dress rehearsal for a mainnet Merge took place last month, when Ethereum merged its Goerli test network (testnet) from PoW to PoS.

The successful conclusion of the Merge will close the book on Ethereum's energy-intensive proof-of-work phase. Ethereum's future plans call for sharding and rollups to increase transaction speeds and reduce fees.

In the last 24 hours, the price of ether (ETH) has decrreased by 7.81%, reaching $1,514.