Ethereum’s Co-Founder, Vitalik Butterin said, “This is the first step in Ethereum’s big journey toward being a very mature system. And there’s still steps left to go. We still have to scale. We still have to fix privacy. We still have to make the thing actually secure for regular users and all this stuff.”
Ethereum successfully transitioned from a PoW to a PoS consensus mechanism when the Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) hit 58750000000000000000000 at 6:44 AM UTC.
The Merge update was long anticipated by the crypto community, with the Ethereum developers holding a Livestream celebration party where over 41K members tuned in to witness the launch of the landmark update.
With Ethereum’s Merge update, the ETH community will end its reliance on crypto mining for network security, and will now require validators to achieve consensus by locking their ETH tokens on the Ethereum network in a process called staking. This would reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by over 99%.
The Ethereum Foundation claims that the Merge will drastically reduce the number of ETH tokens issued daily by 90%. Many believe this update will turn Ethereum into a deflationary currency and drive up its prices in the coming months.
However, some crypto miners, including Chandler Guo, disclosed their skepticism for the Merge and launched an Ethereum PoW fork token called ETHW last month. ETHW’s price hit $60.68 moments after the Merge went live, and is currently priced at $43.40 with a 27% rise in the last 24 hours.
Going forward, the Ethereum developers will add layer 2 networks, called rollups, to increase the network’s scalability.
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