- The Ethereum Merge Is Complete.
- Ethereum’s switch to proof of stake has been planned since 2014.
- Ethereum’s Merge paves way for a greener future.
The Ethereum consumed about the same amount of energy on Tuesday morning as all of Chile. The blockchain’s energy requirements decreased by nearly 99% just before midnight PT time.
After eight years of planning, Ethereum adopted a proof-of-work methodology, making obsolete the electricity-guzzling process of creating ether cryptocurrency tokens.
Ethereum’s switch to proof of stake has been planned since 2014 before the blockchain was officially deployed. Because of its technical complexity, and the increasingly large amount of money at risk, it has been delayed multiple times.
The Merge is part of what in the past was called “ether 2.0,” a series of upgrades that reshape the blockchain’s foundations. “This is the first step in Ethereum’s big journey toward being a very mature system, and there’s still steps to go,” Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin said on a YouTube live stream following the completion of the Merge.
“We still have to scale, we still have to fix privacy, we still have to make the thing secure for regular users, we all need to work hard and do our part.” In a Twitter thread, Vitalik mentions that one important corollary of the merge is better EIP 1559 performance (because fewer blocks bump up against the 2x limit). So far, the percentage of full blocks has dropped from ~20% to ~10%. Amazing stability is definitely anticipated after the merge.
