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After eight years of delays, the blockchain Ethereum has transitioned to a new method of verifying transactions, known as Proof of Stake. The technical upgrade, called the merge, was completed in the early hours of Thursday morning. It significantly reduces the amount of energy used by the network and sets the stage for Ethereum to lower its fees and massively expand its user base.
“It’s hard to compare it to the genesis day in 2015, but it may end up being more significant,” says Joe Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of the blockchain company Consensys. “It basically takes us into an infinite-transaction-per-second throughput architecture…It’s about to go internet-scale.”
Read More: Why The Ethereum Merge Matters
While varying experts and speculators predicted that the merge would either send the price of Ether skyrocketing or tumbling, prices stayed relatively flat during Asia’s trading day.
The merge’s success (thus far) serves as an ideological victory for Ethereum and its decentralized structure. The network has no board of directors or CEO, but rather a group of dispersed developers and engineers working together from around the world. Leaderless collaboration is a central tenet of blockchains, and Ethereum developers proved their ability to self-organize and painstakingly push towards an enormously technically challenging update over the course of many years.
The merge was designed so that Ethereum users themselves don’t need to do anything: their accounts will update automatically. Many scams have proliferated over the last few months online that prompt holders of Ether to “upgrade” their software, when they are really just trying to steal funds. On Thursday morning, developers signaled that the merge had produced few, if any, major bugs.
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Source : time
