Ethereum’s public testnet, Goerli, has completed its merger and moved to a “Proof of Stake” (PoS) mechanism for the final rehearsal for the merger (The Merge) with the beacon chain after the Ethereum mainnet. Next, the development team will shift its focus to the Ethereum mainnet, which is expected to be officially implemented in September.
Boosted by the news, coupled with inflation data driving the overall cryptocurrency market to rise, ether (ETH) has surged more than 13% in the past 24 hours, reaching $1,901.40 as of press time, with a market value of $228.8 billion.
Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden tweeted earlier, “After the Goerli testnet hit the merged TTD goal, there was some confusion on the network due to two different terminal blocks and a large number of unupdated nodes, so we did not Finalized earlier. We’re still investigating, but it doesn’t appear to be an issue at the moment.”
And we finalized on goerli 🚀🚀🚀
There was some confusion on the network because of two different terminal blocks and lots of non-updated nodes, so we didn't finalize earlier. We're still looking into whats happening, but so far it looks quite good— MariusVanDerWijden (@vdWijden) August 11, 2022
It is understood that once the execution layer exceeds the TTD target, the next block will be completely generated by the beacon chain validator, and once the beacon chain finalizes the block, it means the merger has been completed.
Shortly after, Galaxy Digital researcher Christine Kim announced the news of the block finalization, saying, “We may encounter similar minor issues during the mainnet upgrade process, but the point is that the merger was successful.”
Ansgar Dietrichs, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, pointed out that although there were some small obstacles in the merger process, “this is another successful test.”
Goerli is one of the three public testnets of Ethereum. Before that, the Ethereum development team has conducted many tests for the merger, and the other two testnets, Ropsten and Sepolia, have successfully completed the merger. In the past, these testnets used the “Proof of Work” (PoW) mechanism to generate blocks, but now they have been switched to the PoS mechanism, which means that the Ethereum mainnet is not far away from the official merger.
Ethereum still relies on the “Proof of Work” (PoW) consensus mechanism for mining. Once the merger and upgrade is completed, Ethereum will fully switch to the PoS mechanism to operate and eliminate mining. At that time, users will be based on their own contributions or pledged tokens. Validate the transaction amount to get rewards. In this way, the operating efficiency of the Ethereum blockchain will be improved, and the cost of use and energy consumption will be reduced.
