The long-awaited Merge to Proof-of-Stake for Ethereum will likely be delayed further. Ethereum Foundation member Tim Beiko shared on Tuesday night that the Merger will not happen until June, as previously anticipated. Despite the delay, Beiko still anticipates the Unification will happen ‘soon’.
‘The Merge’ for Ethereum may be delayed
Leading altcoin enthusiasts may have to wait a few more months for the long-awaited Merge to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Ethereum Foundation member Tim Beiko stated in a Twitter post on Tuesday night that he believes the long-awaited update will occur by the second quarter of 2022, as currently predicted.
Tim Beiko said, “It won’t be June, but probably in a few months,” noting that it’s in the “final chapter” of the current Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism. “I would highly recommend not investing any further in mining equipment at this point in time,” an ETH miner named TripleSack said in response.
Beiko’s announcement that the Merger will be delayed did not come as a surprise to long-time Ethereum followers. As we covered in the cryptokoin.com news, the process of migrating the Ethereum network to a PoS consensus mechanism goes back to 2016, when co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he believes the transition will be ‘soon’. While Ethereum’s developers have never set a firm deadline for the Merger, estimates have been repeatedly pushed back over the years.
Tim Beiko’s forecast now puts a launch date for the Merger in the second half of 2022, while others are more skeptical. A representative from Flexpool, the sixth largest Ethereum mining pool, stated that their organization does not believe the Merger will occur until 2023. “We are doing our best to identify bugs so that the merger can be delayed further,” said mining pools like Flexpool, as they invest heavily in Ethereum mining, so they wish to use PoW on the network for as long as possible.
Merger refers to Ethereum’s planned network upgrade that will combine the PoW execution layer and the PoS consensus layer into a single Proof-of-Stake-based Blockchain. According to experts, if successful, the switch will drastically reduce the energy consumption of the network and pave the way for future Ethereum scalability updates such as sharding.
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