Ethereum’s Merge event has been highly awaited for years and now that it’s around the corner, the developers want to make sure everything is A-okay. Therefore, core developer Tim Beiko published a thread on Twitter explaining the reason for delaying the difficulty bomb. It is to be noted that the Ethereum difficulty bomb is the difficulty of a problem that miners must solve to find a block and was added to the code in 2015.
The difficulty bomb is of great importance leading to the Merge upgrade for layer-1. According to Beiko, the delay will be of two months to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time.”
He noted,
In essence, the difficulty bomb will act as a deterrent for continuing to run the physical mining ETH operations as the network transforms to proof-of-stake [PoS].
Therefore, after the difficulty bomb comes into effect it will get laborious for miners to verify transactions on the PoW network, thus reducing its profitability. Soon, it will also make it impossible for physical miners to validate a block.
It is clear, that with PoS, Ethereum will be able to solve congestion and meet the demands on the network, at the same time, reducing its energy demands. Other PoS networks and competitors of Ethereum like Polygon and Fantom Opera use negligible power when compared to energy-intensive PoW networks of Bitcoin and currently Ethereum.
Ethereum, Merge, and Price
Before the Merge transitions the network, Ethereum has been looking at a series of test runs to ensure a smooth change. Just last week, Ethereum’s first test network, Ropsten merged on 8th June and was one of the last tenets until the mainnet merge.
After closely following the testnet merge and reporting several bugs reveals by the test merge, the developers’ proposal EIP-5133 to delay the difficulty bomb to August 2022. While a definitive date is unknown, the new EIP-5133 suggests the target for The Merge to occur is “before mid-August 2022.”
In the meantime, Ethereum was noting a downtrend as the price falters by 14% in the past 24-hours. The digital asset was currently changing hands at $1,259.69 and continued to witness an active market as the daily transactions remained above one million.
Whereas, the count of unique addresses has also been rising. It could suggest that the investors have remained optimistic about Ethereum’s future as the metric has not dropped since December 2017. Ethereum currently noted about 198 million unique wallets.