Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake likely delayed, again

What 

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko has intimated that the much-hyped Ethereum merge may likely be delayed to some date after June, the initial date set for the merge 

Why 

It’s ready in a “we could ship it and the network probably wouldn’t crash” way, not in a “we’d like to smoothly transition X00B$ of economic activity” way, Beiko tweeted, fielding questions on Twitter

What next 

When the merge eventually happens, Ethereum will move from a proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof of stake (PoS), where validators secure the network by staking Ether. 

The story 

“How does a community upgrade the heart of a decentralised network while said heart is still beating?” This question lies at the centre of the testing phase that has been ongoing since 2020. 

The Ethereum merge refers to the merging of two chains, the Mainnet and the Beacon chain, that have been running in parallel on the Ethereum blockchain. The Mainnet continues to run on PoW while the Beacon chain has a PoS consensus layer. 

“By keeping the PoS chain isolated from the main network, a ready-to-ship solution is being perfected without risking the flourishing decentralised application platform of the Ethereum PoW chain,” according to ethmerge.com. The Beacon chain has been operational since 2020.

Addressing concerns in a post on Github, Beiko explained that there is no official date set for the merge, and that a date will be set once the software implementations have been thoroughly tested and are bug-free. 

“Shadow forks run against both existing testnets and the Ethereum mainnet have revealed implementation issues in clients. Teams are now fixing these and regularly re-running shadow forks to test fixes,” he said. A time for the upgrade will only be set once testnets are successfully upgraded and remain stable. 

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