The upgrade from the PoW mechanism to PoS was named The Merge, as Ethereum didn’t always use PoS. The development refers to the consolidation of the original Ethereum Mainnet with the Beacon Chain, which now exists as one chain.
Ethereum comes second after Bitcoin in the top most traded cryptocurrencies, which called for developments and improvements for many reasons.
First, trading Ether wasn’t as environmentally friendly as it had the potential to be. Secondly, it wasn’t as user-friendly as it is today because miners needed devices with great capacities that not everyone could operate and possess. Now, it’s easier for crypto lovers to add viable blocks to the blockchain, transactions are faster, and the blockchain and its currencies are more secure than they were before the 15th of September 2022.
Nevertheless, more updates are yet to come, with some expected for 2023. The brilliant minds behind the Ethereum technology are working to improve the blockchain for a safer and easier user experience, so let’s take a moment to appreciate how their efforts made the world greener and trading easier.
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What changes the Ethereum Merge brought?
The middle of September 2022 saw a revolutionary event in economics. The Ethereum Merge, which had been long waited for by crypto traders and investors, though less desired by miners. This means that the blockchain and its currency are now more secure, scalable and sustainable.
But the updates aren’t over, as four more significant improvements are yet to happen. Until then, here are the current considerable benefits of The Merge, synthesised:
– Security. Ethereum needed to boost security, and as its adoption grows, so does the need for its protocol to become more attack-proof.
– Sustainability. Ethereum stopped being energy-intense, as the PoS system cut the network energy by almost 99.9%.
– Scalability. The desire behind the improvements in Ethereum is to make transactions cheaper and faster and to allow for more transactions per second.
What’s the Beacon Chain about?
The Beacon Chain was the original PoS and was launched in 2020. It was developed to ensure the PoS on Ethereum was sustainable and sound to enable on the Ethereum Mainnet. This upgrade brought about serious implications for miners, who woke up not knowing how to put their GPUs to good use anymore, as The Merge ended the mining era. Most likely, they’ll use it to mine another less popular crypto or repurpose them to help create artificial hearts, find cures to cancer, donate to big projects and foundations that need computational power and the like philanthropic or profitable activities.
In September 2020, the Beacon Chain merged with the original Ethereum PoW chain and introduced the PoS to the ecosystem. It also initiated the block gossip protocol and consensus logic which now secures Ethereum.
When’s the time to buy Ethereum?
No one can or should advise you when to buy Ether. Generally, it’s best to make investment decisions using common sense and the knowledge acquired. However, you should listen to experienced traders to find out how to buy eth, and decide on a trading strategy, the platform and type of digital wallet you’ll use, should you buy the currency.
Experts and investors want you to know that you shouldn’t buy more than you can afford to lose and don’t recommend putting all your money into one digital asset.
The latter is a golden piece of advice. Remember the old saying, “don’t put all of your eggs into one basket”? The same can go for crypto, too. When the basket falls, every egg is broken, and when the market’s down, the same happens with your funds.
However, if something doesn’t sit right with you and you’d like to invest but not in cryptocurrency right now, there are other ways you can take use of Ethereum:
- Create a digital currency through a smart contract
- Create tokens and NFTs
- Create a play-to-earn game.
How will sharding change Ethereum?
Sharding is an event expected to occur somewhere in 2023 and will give the blockchain more capacity to access and store data, but shards won’t be used for executing code.
Through the sharding process, a database is split horizontally to spread the load, a technique common in computer science. In the Ethereum context, this process will complement layer 2 rollups by spreading the burden of handling the large amount of data required by rollups across the entire network. This will raise the number of transactions per second while lowering network congestion.
Sharding is a multi-phase upgrade that aims to boost Ethereum’s capacity and scalability. The new feature is also expected to lower the transaction fees. It also should enable rollups to be cheaper and secure the distribution of data storage requirements. Running nodes might be easier to operate and more accessible, and remove the need for validators to store all of the data themselves.
What are the forthcoming Ethereum upgrades?
The new, improved Ethereum is only 55% complete. Although scalability, security and sustainability are being worked on concurrently, specific dependencies determine when the four future upgrades will be deployed. Following are four events that crypto enthusiasts look forward to happening.
- The Surge – it will give birth to the “sharding” feature;
- The Verge – it is expected to diminish Ethereum’s reliance on nodes;
- The Purge – it should reduce the capacity needed to store Ethereum;
- The Splurge – it is the final upgrade, and we will check if the network runs smoothly enough after the previous improvements.
Conclusion
All in all, The Merge has been delivering many positive aspects. Institutional investors are likely to turn from Bitcoin to Ethereum, and governments and financial institutions who rejected cryptocurrency now have no other option but to acknowledge it as an emerging, powerful technology increasingly more people are jumping on.
Many believe blockchain has changed the face of digital transactions since more and more businesses allow crypto as payment methods, and entrepreneurs are looking for ways to introduce it in start-up plans. Some believe that decentralised finances will, sooner or later, surpass traditional finances, but these are just assumptions, and only time will tell what’s going to happen.
