ETH POS Is Live!
ChangeNOW congratulates everyone on this event that opens a new chapter in the history of crypto! In the coming days, we will see how much more sustainable Ethereum has become – the energy consumption is expected to decrease by 99.95%. The Merge’s effect on Ethereum tokenomics and ecosystem is to be assessed later, but here’s what we can say for sure today – the groundwork for scalable, fast, low-cost, and secure Ethereum has been laid.
The Merge happened at 06:42 AM UTC on September 15th, 2022, when the Terminal Total Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000 in the Ethereum network was achieved. This occurred at block 15537393 – the last one that was mined. All subsequent blocks have been validated by stakers using the Proof of Stake consensus layer of Ethereum (Beacon Chain before the Merge).
Vitalik Buterin recognized the Merge as successful after the first two epochs, 32 blocks and 6.4 minutes each, were finalized. Validator participation rate reached 96% (at least 66% are needed to reach epoch finality).
Check out our explanatory article for more details about the Merge.
Some users may have expected that the Merge would reduce gas fees and increase speed in Ethereum right after the update. We’d love that to have happened – but Proof of Stake doesn’t scale the network itself, it creates the basis for future updates instead. Read more about how Ethereum will continue to scale after the Merge here.
The Merge went seamlessly for the ChangeNOW ecosystem – all products including ChangeNOW, NOW Wallet, NOWPayments, and NOWNodes keep processing Ethereum transactions as usual.
ETHW, the Ethereum hard fork planned by an independent group of miners, is slated to launch 24 hours after the Merge. The EthereumPoW team will announce the exact time 1 hour before launch with a countdown timer, and all tech details will follow “when the time’s up.” ChangeNOW is closely following the situation, and our ecosystem products are ready to list the coin in case it’s released.
Stay tuned, and congratulations to all the crypto geeks on one of the biggest days in the history of crypto!
