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Ethereum Merge a ‘few months after’ June: Dev clears up what’s going on

April 14, 2022No Comments


The long-awaited Ethereum Merge is slated for another delay, with developers working on the upgrade estimating a completion time “a few months after” June.

Due to the success of the tests, there was a general expectation that Fusion would happen by the middle of the year, however the latest setback is hardly surprising given that Proof of Stake has been consistently delayed since it was first proposed.

That said, the signs promise that the Ethereum mainnet will actually merge with the beacon chain to become a proof-of-stake (PoS) network this year. Real.

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko provided the to updated timeline via Twitter yesterday, tentatively stating that the core devs are in the home stretch:

“It will not be in June, but probably in the months after. There is no firm date yet, but we are definitely in the final chapter of PoW on Ethereum."

After noting that his comments caused a stir among Ethereum supporters and haters alike, Beiko continued today by observing “that it can be difficult to analyze progress on The Merge when you're not deep in the process.”

To provide more context, Beiko published a blog post with a more detailed summary.

According to the developer, no specific date will be set until "customer teams are confident that software implementations have been thoroughly tested and are bug free."

Central to these later stages is public testnet testing. like ovenand the get out of the shadow forks that allow developers to test various merge/PoS related implementations on the network.

Difficulty bomb ticking

Another big factor is the difficulty pump (an automated increase in mining difficulty designed to make PoW mining less appealing), which Beiko says will start to kick in on Ethereum around May and will cause blocks to be " excruciatingly (read 15-20 seconds) slow in August..”

"If client developers don't think they can implement The Merge on the mainnet before block times get too low, it will need to be delayed again," he said.

Beiko presented two ways in which the difficulty bomb could be delayed to usher in the Merge update beforehand, firstly by combining a bomb delay with merge client releases to delay the "bomb by a given block, restoring block times of 13 seconds, and then activating The Merge soon after.

Second, to separate the bomb delay through the network update "which only delays the difficulty bomb" before the merger.

“The merger, unlike previous Ethereum upgrades, will not go live for a lockup time. Instead, it will be triggered by a full difficulty value. Since these are more difficult to estimate than block times, the delay between choosing a time for The Merge and its going live on the network may be a bit shorter than previous Ethereum updates.”

Related: Ethereum Derivatives Data Shows Professional Traders Are Bearish, But For How Long?

Earlier this week, Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi suggested that there is still a fair amount of trial and error to come, after noting that the shadow three-fork test resulted in “errors ranging from timing code to search for request timeouts".

Following the successful implementation of The Merge and the transition to a PoS consensus mechanism, the final milestone in the roadmap for Ethereum (formerly known as Eth2) is the sharded-chains upgrade to be released in early 2023. Until then, however, the network will use Layer 2 networks like Polygon and Optimism to handle scalability and high transaction volumes.

The price of ether (ETH) has seen a significant upturn in the last 30 days, gaining 20.5% to stand at $3,126 at the time of writing.