The long-awaited update The Merge has been delayed again, as revealed by developer Tim Beiko on his Twitter. With that, the ETH (ETH) mining shift was again postponed.
The Merge has been delayed again
According to the ETH Foundation and Vitalik Buterin, The Merge would be implemented between May and June 2022. However, Beiko stated that the launch should be done in the “following months”. That is, it is likely that The Merge will only be implemented at the end of the year.
Beiko revealed the news when responding to a user’s question about whether the release date would indeed be in June. The developer’s response was emphatic: “it won’t be in June”.
The Foundation’s developer and community leader added that there is no official release date. However, Beiko assured that the move to Proof of Stake (PoS) is in its “final chapters”.
The Merge is a fusion between the main ETH layer and the Beacon Chain, which takes care of the stakink part. This means switching from ETH to a PoS mining engine, replacing the current Proof of Work (PoW).
With The Merge, users will also be able to staking, that is, leaving their cryptocurrencies locked in Ethereum. In exchange, they will receive fractions of Ether (ETH) to validate the transactions, in a kind of passive income. Staking was implemented with EIP-1559 and should be improved after the new update.
Ultimately, the upgrade should reduce Ethereum’s energy costs by 99% and make it easier to scale the network. But users will need to wait a little longer for these changes
Beiko’s update comes after Ethereum passed a major milestone on Monday with the first successful mainnet shadow fork. Shadow fork is a split that copies all data from the original blockchain – equivalent to a simulation that aims to test aspects of Merge.
