Ethereum - The Daily Gwei #531
A new era for Ethereum has now begun.
It finally happened - Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers have merged and Ethereum is now a full Proof of Stake chain! The best part is that the transition went near-perfectly with only a very small percentage of validators falling off of the network - an incredible achievement. It’s a very happy day for me personally as I’ve been waiting 5 and a half years for this moment since Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake was one of the reasons I got so excited about Ethereum in the first place.
The Merge is the culmination of work by hundreds of people spanning many years and many different domains of knowledge. It began when Vitalik talked about Ethereum becoming a PoS network very early on (late 2013/early 2014). After a long while in the research phase, development started in 2018 and accelerated in 2019 and 2020 towards what would come to be known as the ‘Beacon Chain’. Then, on December 1st 2020, the Beacon Chain went live and has since accumulated over 400,000 validators that are staking over 13 million ETH. After the launch of the Beacon Chain, all attention shifted to ‘merging’ the two Ethereum chains and this would keep the core developers and researchers busy over 2021 and 2022 with many devnets, testnets and shadow forks. That, of course, brings us to today where Ethereum is finally a full Proof of Stake chain.
So you may be wondering, what’s next? Well, quite a lot actually! I’m sure by now you’ve all seen Vitalik’s flow chart of the Ethereum roadmap (check it out here if you haven’t) but in terms of immediate upgrades we can all look forward to, there’s Shanghai which could include features such as staking withdrawals, EIP-4844 and others. This upgrade is expected to happen around 6-12 months from now but this just a rough estimate and we could even see staking withdrawals be included in its own upgrade before Shanghai (since this feature is critical given recent conversations around censorship thanks to OFAC sanctioning Tornado Cash).
Finally, I just wanted to express a heartfelt thank you to every single person that made The Merge possible. Your contributions will be forever etched into the history books of Ethereum and your work has laid the foundations that the rest of the Ethereum roadmap will be built upon. You should all feel extremely proud and you definitely all deserve all the praise in the world for your efforts - thank you again.
To everyone else - welcome to the new era of Ethereum that really has only just begun.
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.