The long awaited merge of Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum blockchain has launched, seeking to secure a potential greener future for the crypto industry. 

Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder of Ethereum, announced via his Twitter that the merge has officially launched in what he has described as a “big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem”. 

 

The merge’s launch date comes after it successfully underwent its Bellatrix upgrade, proving to be the final stage of the blockchains transition to PoS. The merge will afford less computational work to run as opposed to a PoW chain. 

For more information on what the PoW to PoS merge entails, read here.

Buterin claims that Ethereum will now be able to process “100,000 transactions per second” once its ‘The Merge, Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge’ phases are complete. These are the next four stages of Ethereum’s roadmap. 

Since its inception in December 2020, the PoS blockchain moves away from crypto miners – a system of competition between miners whose transactions were ledgered against one another – and opts for a stakeholder-based approach.

The new PoS system that the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain will operate more in line with a lottery-based approach, where stakers of up to a minimum of 32ETH will be sent an address to write a block on the chain, as the more ETH tokens owned the higher the chance the user will be chosen. 

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency – with a market cap of over $200bn – may yet still be hampered by slow speeds experienced by users, as it was not addressed if this would be resolved as a result of the Merge. 

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