Ethereum merger is not expected in June, it may come this fall

After weeks of speculation, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko confirmed in a tweet on Tuesday that the long-awaited Ethereum merger will come later than expected. Beiko said the network’s transition to proof-of-stake is more likely to happen in “a few months” rather than in June.

The merger marks Ethereum’s move to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism. Today, the network relies on a proof-of-work (PoW) system, where a decentralized network of computers competes to validate transactions.

Ethereum’s shift to a PoS mechanism, where users retain the ability to secure the network by “staking” ETH, is expected to reduce Ethereum’s energy costs by 99% and make the network easier to scale.

According to Bitpush, Ethereum's first mainnet shadow fork was launched on Monday. Tim Beiko said that the result of the shadow fork is the key to determining the final merger time.

However, according to a tweet posted over the weekend by Ethereum DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathi, three recent shadow forks of the Ethereum Goerli testnet have revealed bugs that still need to be resolved before the update is ready.

Building a new consensus mechanism for Ethereum would introduce significant complexity. In addition to introducing a number of engineering challenges, Ethereum’s PoS model would also add a new set of mechanisms to ensure that network validators act in good faith.

With billions of dollars at stake, a single misstep would have catastrophic consequences for the entire ecosystem.

Even after the merger, Ethereum’s high gas fees and relatively slow speeds — which make the network unusable for many applications — are likely to remain.

Ethereum is the epicenter of decentralized finance (DeFi), GameFi, and NFTs, but a slew of newer PoS chains are catching up by offering users faster and cheaper transactions.

The merger replaces ethereum’s original “Ethereum 2.0” plan, which included adding sharding, which would increase network throughput by dividing activity into parts that can be processed simultaneously. Sharding is still on the ethereum roadmap, but it has been delayed until 2023 in order to speed up the transition to PoS.

With this in mind, much of the attention of the Ethereum developer community has shifted to Layer 2 rollups like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Loopring, which have amassed billions of dollars in total value locked in third-party solutions for scaling the Ethereum network.

Even after the merger, more and more network activity is expected to shift to these layer 2 networks, which process transactions on separate blockchains before bundling them up and passing them back to the ethereum base layer.

Layer 2 solutions each have unique advantages and disadvantages compared to Ethereum, but they tend to be faster and cheaper than the base layer while still including basic security guarantees.