As the clock counts down to the final moments of the biggest Ethereum (ETH) merger, co-founder Vitalik Buterin joins the “Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party” live stream hosted by the Ethereum Foundation to share his final thoughts.
When asked if he was excited about the merger, Buterin replied, “I’m very happy to be out of the certification period.”
The co-founder went on to describe the network’s historic transition from proof-of-work to POS.
“[It] It has been a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem since its inception. In a January 2014 blog post on Slosher, we began researching the proof of the problem.
The combination redefined the laws of physics as a new butyrin. PoW works using real-world functions such as electricity, hardware, and computers. But with PoS, everything is virtual, “essentially allowing us to create a simulated universe with its own laws of physics.
Buterin said the big motivation for the switch was high costs and high energy consumption. Fusion is said to reduce energy consumption by 99.95 percent.
Related: ‘Rocket Launch’ – Observers about Ethereum’s post-merger future
He also pointed out that this would not only be good for the environment, but also for “non-environmental externalities”, which has been a big agenda for the crypto space among environmentalists. The example is given by the increase in GPU price due to ETH mining.
Shortly after Vitalik’s little focus on live streaming, the merger happened on September 15th at 06:42:42 UTC at block 15537393. Ethereum’s mainnet enforcement layer and Beacon Chain’s consensus layer are handled by the terminal’s general difficulty. 587500000000000000000. After the merger, the network will no longer rely on the PoW consensus mechanism.
Buterin congratulated the community and ushered in the next era of Ethereum on Twitter:
And we are done!
Happy integration everyone. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merger happen should be very proud today.
– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022
These new improvements allow developers and users to scale the network in ways that were previously impossible or unsustainable. This is a critical step towards mass adoption of decentralized technologies and bringing the next billion into the ecosystem.