In the late hours of Wednesday, Ethereum’s (ETH) largest testnet, dubbed Goerli, successfully completed the move to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system. The transition occurred at around 1:45 UTC when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) breached 10,790,000. All eyes are now set on the final merge, scheduled to take place next month. Many expect the final move to a PoS consensus method to occur sometime towards the end of September.
Developers ran many tests to prepare for this historic change. The Ethereum (ETH) team announced an upgrade to the Prater network. The upgrade, called Bellatrix, prepared the Goerli chain for its merge. Goerli is the third and final testnet merge before Ethereum’s big move.
The two testnet’s before Goerli, Ropsten, and Sepolia were equally successful.
Ethereum rallies big as merge inches closer
Ethereum’s success has had an impact on its price, which was expected. ETH finally broke through the $1800 level, with up to 12.2% gains in the last 24 hours. Additionally, ETH has registered gains of up to 71.4% in the last 30 days.
The 2022 market crash was one of the most brutal and harsh. Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) lost about 70% of their value since the beginning of the year. Furthermore, we witnessed the death of a blockchain with the demise of the Terra network. The fall of Terra had repercussions in all corners of the crypto industry.
Nonetheless, markets are slowly pulling out of the carnage. And this time around, it was Ethereum that led the pack. Investors have been eagerly waiting for the merge, and its inching closer has pushed Ethereum into the greens.
In addition, some have predicted the formation of two Ethereum coins once the merge occurs. According to BitMEX, the merge will lead to the formation of an ETH2 coin and an ETHPoW coin. However, they admitted that the ETHPoW coin may have technical issues and long-term viability concerns.
At press time, ETH was trading at $1,880.64, up by 16% in the last 7-days.