The second-largest blockchain Ethereum has gotten a step closer to transitioning to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism as the core developers successfully merged the network’s Ropsten testnet to the Beacon chain late Wednesday.
Ropsten initially launched in 2016, and it’s currently the oldest testnet on Ethereum. It permits the testing of blockchain development before deployment on the mainnet. According to the developers, Ropsten has now been moved from the current proof-of-work Ethereum chain to the PoS Beacon Chain.
When will Ethereum 2.0 launch?
The development today is a big progress and a major step toward the long-awaited launch of Ethereum 2.0, but not the final. The developers said there are also two other critical Ethereum testnets – Goerli and Seoplia – that need to be merged to the Beacon chain before the final deployment of the mainnet to PoS.
The headways reported tend to indicate that the Ethereum merge to PoS could happen later this year, as the developers had said. While speaking at the recent ETH Shanghai Web 3.0 Developer Summit, the co-founder Vitalik Buterin hinted that the final mainnet merge could happen anytime in August 2022.
However, the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, recently argued that Eth2 would launch no earlier than 2023. He predicted that the merge would be more likely to happen in 2024.
The big deal
Eth2 marks the end of the mining era on the blockchain. Crypto mining has become heavily monitored and scrutinized by regulators due to the extensive energy consumption and the environmental impact of the energy used for the activity. Ultimately, the current PoW chain suffers severe congestion, which makes the network barely usable for small transactions.
With the upcoming merge, block creation on the blockchain will be reached through staking, and flaunted upgrades will address the scalability issues.
