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The Ethereum Merge is completed: Here’s what’s next

The Ethereum Merge is completed: Here's what's next


The Ethereum blockchain has successfully completed its shift away from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus following the merge of the Mainnet and the Beacon Chain.

The Merge took place on Sep.15 as the network shifted to PoS seamlessly, seeing hardware-based miners replaced by validators that stake Ether (ETH) to process transactions, add new blocks and maintain the network.

The most pertinent question in the cryptocurrency space is, what happens next? The Ethereum Foundation has always worked on a long roadmap of development milestones, and The Merge is no different.

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously outlined a five-step, gradual process that will bring the smart contract blockchain to what he described as the ‘Endgame’ of Ethereum’s development.

The end goal would see the network capable of high block frequency and block size as well as the ability to process thousands of transactions per second while remaining sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant.

The Merge

The Merge was the first step in this five-part process, which has since been elaborated upon by a number of Ethereum developers, ecosystem participants and commentators. The key change of the Merge is the drastic reduction in power consumption, reducing Ethereum’s energy usage by 99%.

Hours before the Merge took place, Buterin quoted Ethereum researcher Justin Drake’s estimate that the event would also reduce global electricity consumption by 0.2%.

The second important change brought about by the shift to PoS is the reduced issuance of ETH through rewards to validators for their work maintaining the network, making ETH become a deflationary asset.

The Surge

2023 is earmarked as the year that Ethereum will implement sharding, an important step in increasing the scalability of the blockchain’s ability to store and access data.

The Ethereum Foundation describes sharding as the process of separating a database horizontally to spread the network’s workload….

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