Ethereum took the penultimate step towards the less energy-intensive proof-of-stake (PoS) validation via a successful merge with the Sepolia PoS consensus chain.
Crypto’s second most popular coin said its final trial is scheduled to take place on the Goerli network over the following few weeks before the official merge on the Ethereum mainnet can be given the green light.
Thanks to everyone who watched the Sepolia merge livestream!!
The Sepolia merge transition went through successfully (and the chain finalized!) so now it's time for monitoring over the next few days.
Then we merge Goerli...
...then mainnet
The Merge is coming ????
— sassal.eth ???????????? (@sassal0x) July 6, 2022
Although some problems were encountered, with 25-30% of validators going offline after the merge on “wrong config[urations],” according to Terence Tsao, an Ethereum protocol developer.
Sepolia summary:
- Merge transition itself was a success
- 25-30% of the validators went offline shortly after the merge
- The offline validators were due to wrong configs
- Since then, the offline parties have updated their configs, and validators are up
(cont)
— terence.eth (@terencechain) July 6, 2022
The testnet merges have been labelled a “dress rehearsal” that has helped inform Ethereum developers and independent ones too to fathom what can be expected from the actual merge.
During the live stream, its co-founder Vitalik Buterin admitted the main network merge will include “much more third-party infrastructure that isn’t present on the testnets.”
He added: “There might be non-critical issues like that that will just pop up in the merge that we’re not catching with these tests.
“There’s a lot of peripherals that are just not getting tested and that’s unavoidable and probably fine.”
Ethereum currently uses PoW, which requires miners to discover new blocks and add them to the blockchain, in a highly energy-intensive way, to earn new Ethereum.
The complicated change of coding requires several tests on various testnets before the two chains will merge and Ethereum can officially become a PoS blockchain.
Ethereum takes its first step towards PoS with Ropsten testnet