The long-awaited merger of Ethereum could come even a little faster than planned, after the core developers have now brought forward the tentatively planned date to September 15.
The new date was announced yesterday Thursday as part of a conference call of the core developers, because responsible developers such as Tim Beiko and Terence Tsao agree that a Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) of 58750000000000000000000 could already be reached on this day, to which the switch could be made.
Beiko later confirmed this forecast on GitHub in the post “Tentative Mainnet TTD”.
Although the TTD and thus also the merge date could still be postponed, the many successful tests in the run-up to the event give hope that the switch to the proof-of-stake (PoS) procedure will proceed as planned in September.
The new date would be three days earlier than the previous estimate, because Tim Beiko had previously envisioned September 19 as the likely date.
Tentative Mainnet TTD
58750000000000000000000
Note: nothing is final until it’s in client release, so do expect changes last minute due to unforeseen circumstances https://t.co/PQ0YOKpk1u
– terence.eth (@terencechain) August 11, 2022
The Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) is the degree of difficulty of the final block, which heralds the transition from the proof-of-Work (PoW) to the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus procedure.
Before the merge can be completed, the Bellatrix hard fork must first be performed, which should ensure that all nodes have the necessary software to make the transition. This hard fork is scheduled to be launched on September 6, just under 10 days before the merge.
Today, on Friday, the Goerli test network successfully completed the last major dress rehearsal for the changeover, after similar tests had already been successful on Sepolia and Ropsten without any problems.
The merge is intended to reduce Ethereum’s power consumption by more than 99.99%, and it is also intended to increase the security and scalability of the network.
