Ethereum (ETH) network will roll out its next major upgrade in August, according to core developer Preston Van Loon who made the statement at a panel at the Permissionless conference.
“As far as we know, if everything goes to plan, August—it just makes sense,” he said before adding, “If we don’t have to move [the difficulty bomb], let’s do it as soon as we can.”
The Merge will transit the Ethereum network consensus mechanism from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake (PoS). With this upgrade, it will reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by more than 99%, which hopefully will keep the critics, policymakers, and environmentalists at bay.
Ethereum client developers announced the final phase of testing this week, that Merge will be deployed on the Ropsten testnet on June 8. Ropsten is the closest development network to the real thing, so it can able to rigorously battle-test both the Merge and PoS.
The Merge will not lower gas fees. An over-hyped nonfunglible token (NFT) collection that was launched on the network has an average transaction fees surged to around $200 earlier this month. Many users have complaints regarding the high cost of using Ethereum when under heavy load, and there will be little relief on that side of things from the Merge.
As the bears are still in control of crypto markets, the positive fundamentals have done very little for ETH prices. Although Ethereum has been battered this month, it has gained 3.6% on the day to top $2,000 once again.
According to CoinGecko, the asset was sent tumbling to 58% when it was dumped a painful 26% below its Novrember all-time high of $4,878 over the past fortnight. ETH will unlikely see any bullish momentum until there is a broader turnaround in the outlook fo the overall crypto market.
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