One of the world’s biggest blockchains Ethereum is testing a new way to approve transactions. It will be merging the existing Ethereum mainnet with the Beacon chain of the Ethereum 2.0 system. It is scheduled for launch in the second quarter of 2022. However, an exact date has not been disclosed.
Logical month for merging
It is expected that after some reshuffling, “Eth2” or now called “consensus layer” might finally have a fixed date for launch.
One Reddit member (u/superphiz) of the r/ethstaker community predicted that it would happen in June of this year. In an elaborate post on Reddit, u/superphiz outlines the following five reasons as to why June is a logical month for the merge to occur.
Additionally, on February 19, Ethereum researcher and implementation organizer Danny Ryan explained that the merger was very close. Ryan quoted:
“It’s really actually, very close. I think he’s [the difficulty bomb] is going to be impeccably timed. The difficulty bomb is set to go off, to begun to be felt, some time in June, some time in July.”
Notably, during the Consensus Layer #83 call on March 10, the discussion around the launch of the Tesnet oven implied that the “merger” could happen soon.
The Kiln testnet was meant to be the last major testnet before the merge. And, it is supposed to run for three months. In addition, Marius Van Der Wijden announced the launch of the Kiln public merge testnet. A Reddit user pointed out the significance of this announcement through the following statement,
He additionally has affirmed:
“Anyone who has ever observed these events will know that these testnets are merged with a product ready to launch. While I don’t know the expected timeline for these testnet launches, it’s very reasonable to expect a two-week delay between each testnet merge.
On 11 March, the configuration for the Kiln testnet was announced. Lastly, the aforementioned difficulty bomb is expected to ‘explode’ around June 2022. In this regard, the Reddit user wrote:
Is it worth the wait?
More than 10 million ether (ETH) are locked on Ethereum’s Eth 2.0 staking contract ahead of a planned upgrade. It was worth around $25.5 billion at press time.
In fact, this month saw a spike of ether deposits to the Eth 2.0 contracts after a relatively lean period in January and February this year.
