Ethereum Merge may come sooner than expected

Ethereum’s long-awaited transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus, known as “the Merge” could happen a few days ahead of schedule, Ethereum educator and cybersecurity professional Anthony Sassano revealed.

In a Thursday tweet, Sassano said “the Merge is coming,” noting that the information was from a core developer consensus layer call.

The Merge event, which was slated for completion on September 19, may now occur on September 15 or 16. Core developers such as Tim Beiko and Terence Tsao agreed in a Thursday developer call that the event would happen when Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) hits 58750000000000000000000. This was further confirmed in a GitHub post titled “Tentative mainnet TTD” from Beiko on Thursday.

Although the exact date and the TTD could still change, the successes of various testnet merges suggest that a mainnet integration slated for next month will happen without issue.

Notably, Ethereum successfully completed its final testnet on the Georli testnet on Thursday following the Sepolia merge on July 7 and Ropsten on June 9. This leaves two more upgrades until the mainnet event - “Bellatrix” and “Paris.”

The Bellatrix event will enable the software needed for clients to run the consensus layer. The upgrade is expected to happen on September 6, roughly ten days before Merge.

Ethereum’s transition to PoS is expected to make the network more energy efficient and faster. It is also expected to lower transaction fees, a hurdle that has been a major setback for the blockchain. However, the migration eliminates the need for miners, and this has prompted some miners to push for a fork of the network to remain as proof-of-work.

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