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The upcoming Ethereum merge will also be the triple halvening event as the issuance of Ether (ETH) will be reduced significantly and there’s good news on the proposed switch from Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Stake (POS) as the testnets report achieving significant milestones, ahead of the Altair hard fork expected on Oct 27. Currently, the Eth 1 and the Eth2 blockchains operate independently and can’t communicate with each other.
On Oct 05, the Ethereum 2.0 team also released new client versions for beacon node operators to upgrade and prepare themselves for the Altair hard fork – accelerating the Ethereum merge, named after the twelfth brightest star in the night sky. All validators must upgrade to continue operation on the Beacon Chain and not doing so will attract downtime penalties. The rewards for the bug bounty are also being enhanced to offer upto double the previous amounts, from now and until four weeks after the launch.
About Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 is the next big upgrade for the Ethereum network.. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM, and sharding. Also, it will reduce the resources required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.
The Eth2 upgrade will start in three phases. The first Phase 0 Beacon Chain launched on Dec 01 ’20 and introduced the staking feature. Then, the Ethereum merge will happen followed by Phase 1 in Q1 2021, which will introduce sharding and allow data storage on shards, however, transactions can’t still be processed.
Phase 2 will make the Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational. This will happen after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Only after the ETH2 chain has been rolled out, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence. The Eth1 and Eth2 chains will gradually merge with each other, known as the Ethereum merge.
