Ethereum Foundation Announces Official Date for the Merge

The Ethereum Foundation has confirmed that the long-awaited Merge is expected to come sooner than previously expected.

“Following years of hard work, Ethereum’s proof-of-stake upgrade is finally here! The successful upgrade of all public testnets is now complete, and The Merge has been scheduled for the Ethereum mainnet.”

• According to a new blog post, the mainnet migration to a proof-of-stake network will complete between September 10 and 20 with the Bellatrix upgrade, which is responsible for setting the Merge in motion, and will be activated on the Beacon Chain.
• The Foundation revealed that the activation is slated for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain, which should occur at 11:34:47 AM UTC on September 6, 2022.
• Following this, the execution layer’s portion of the transition, Paris, will be triggered by the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) value of 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000.
• The team reiterated that the exact date for Merge would be determined by the Proof-of-Work (PoW) hash rate. As such, the more hash rate joins the network, TTD will be triggered sooner.
• Contrarily, TTD will be delayed if the hash rate leaves the network.
• The Ethereum developers had earlier speculated that the date for the transition could be around September 15-16.
• Ahead of the planned schedule, critical bugs in the mainnet update of the ETH clients, the Nethermind and Go ETH, were discovered recently.
• The developers, however, managed to provide a fix just a day after detection.