Ethereum developers encounter problems in The Merge tests, will updade be delayed?

ETH developers met at the Core Devs Meeting, a meeting that aims to liaise with the development of the network. During the meeting, developers identified issues related to the readiness of customer teams.

As a result, this could mean a delay for The Merge, the network’s long-awaited update. However, the team is optimistic that it will be able to resolve the issues in time.

In this way, the developers scheduled a new test of Merge. After running the update on Ropsten, it is now time for the Sepolia testnet to receive the update. If everything goes as planned, the Sepolia chain will host The Merge until July 6th.

New fork alerts developers

The developers had a long discussion about the issues surrounding the seventh shadow fork, which took place on Wednesday (22). Shadow forks is the name given to purposeful divisions created in test networks, created by predetermined nodes.

These tests take place on private networks before moving to public networks. But according to the developers, the last shadow fork was not successful. In fact, 20% of the nodes went offline after activation, and others lost connection to the network during the test.

For Alexey Sharp, an independent researcher, part of the problem was related to the nature of shadow forks and not The Merge itself. The Erigon nodes showed failures precisely because of the fork.

The Hyperledger Besu system also experienced issues caused by a crash that was due to a concurrency bug in the Bonsai Tries nodes. According to the team, 25% of network validators use Besu software. These validators ran into issues after activating The Merge.

However, the developers remain confident that they will be able to deploy the merge to the Sepolia testnet on July 6, 2022. Before that, however, the Gray Glacier hard fork will take place next Wednesday (29).

Gray Glacier will change the parameters of the mining difficulty bomb upgrade, pushing it back by 700K blocks. This is roughly the equivalent of 100 days. But unlike Sepolia, the developers will not release Gray Glacier on a testnet.

Therefore, ETH nodes and members will have the space between June 29th and July 6th to prepare against any failures. Then the new test will definitely be released.

How ETH prices will respond

After the implementation of The Merge, the expectation is for a big cut in the supply of Ether (ETH). The best estimates account for something like up to three halvings of the BTC.

Lark Davis, a major influencer and cryptocurrency investor, shared that The Merge’s success, combined with less ETH on the market, could cause cryptocurrency prices to skyrocket.