This Ethereum Upgrade to Merge Completed Without Issues!

Ethereum was designed to be a blockchain platform that could execute and verify smart contracts without the need for a central authority. In the case of smart contracts, participants are able to conduct business without the need for a mediator. All transacting parties have full access to a distributed ledger of transactions that cannot be altered and can be independently verified.

It is Ethereum accounts that are used to transmit and receive transactions. Senders must use a signed transaction and Ether as payment for the network to process their transaction.

If Ethereum's assertions about the success of the Merge update are to be believed, then future upgrades should also go smoothly.

While The Merge is a significant advancement, there are still many more updates in the works to further reduce Ethereum's energy consumption.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum network upgrade was completed at 2:45 p.m. Hong Kong time, marking the end of the long wait for the update.

The Merge is a massive upgrade to the infrastructure of the second-largest blockchain in the world, which might reduce energy consumption while increasing transaction speeds. Its market capitalization is $200 billion.

During a live-streamed Merge event held by the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged the significance of the occasion but stressed that there is still much more to come.

Let's complete the rest of that ecosystem and turn Ethereum into what we envision it to be," he proclaimed. The Merge is a prime example of the changes that will transform Ethereum into what its creators always envisioned it would be.

Following the announcement of the Merge, Ether's price jumped to a high of $1,648 on Thursday, before dropping 0.5% to $1,611.

The second largest token in the world had a roughly 50% increase in market valuation in the three months leading up to the Merge. But rising interest rates and inflation in the United States have put a halt to the industry's progress in recent years.

Digital asset trader Amber Group's Institutional Sales Director Justin d'Anethan told Forkast that the macro narrative currently dragging down risk assets makes this a really exciting time for the Merge to take place. Speculators in cryptocurrencies should experience a surge of hope and enthusiasm around the time of the Merge.

While d'Anethan claims that I remain enthusiastic on Ethereum, I would not venture a timeline prediction for the next few weeks or months due to the large number of variables involved.

Since the Split, Ethereum has transitioned from a PoW consensus process to a PoS one based on the concept of "stakes" (PoW). To participate in the blockchain's transaction validation process, PoS participants must stake a quantity of Ether equal to the amount of Ether they wish to see validated.

Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the initial mechanism used to validate transactions in Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. This method requires crypto miners to use energy-intensive computer farms to verify transactions.

By switching to PoS, the Ethereum Foundation estimates that network power usage can be cut by 99.95 percent. This is beneficial for Ethereum and the cryptocurrency sector in general, since it is receiving more attention as a result of the worldwide movement to decarbonize economies, says Jonathan Victor, head of NFT and Web3 storage at open-source R&D business Protocol Labs.

He noted that this is especially problematic for NFTs, the vast majority of which are housed on Ethereum, and said that since most businesses aim to be carbon neutral by 2050, the Merge would bring ETH a great distance closer to this goal. Even the most outspoken [NFT] critics will have their worries allayed by this migration.

D'Anethan urged investors and the wider cryptocurrency community to remain calm despite the commotion caused by The Merge.

Investors, per d'Anethan: "[It] sets the path for countless prospective Ethereum upgrades," thus it's important to look behind the hype.

HISTORY OF THE MERGE

Vitalik Buterin, in the introduction to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, mentions the eventual necessity to replace proof-of-work.

In 2015, the Ethereum network was launched. About 72,000,000 ether coins were generated in the first block. Buterin received 553,000 of this ether.

In order to gauge consumer interest in proof-of-stake, Ethereum will release a beacon chain deposit contract in October 2020. As soon as the merge is complete, anyone who has invested 32 ether (ethereum promises) will be able to validate ethereum transactions.

In November 2020, the beacon chain will have staked the minimum amount of ether (524.288 ether), as determined by Ethereum, for it to be regarded a fully operating mechanism.

Once the staking threshold is passed in December 2020, the beacon chain will be activated seven days later. The next step is to code and test the chain to see if it can handle Ethereum's expected transaction volume.

In September of 2022, the merger bore fruit.

Ethereum's native Solidity scripting language and the Ethereum Virtual Machine offer a flexible foundation for building decentralized applications.

Ethereum's maturity has provided a rich ecosystem of developer tools and established best practices, which are valuable to the developers of decentralized apps that deploy smart contracts on the platform.

MetaMask, Argent, Rainbow, and other wallets offer simple interfaces for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts deployed there, demonstrating that the Ethereum ecosystem has matured to the point where the user experience for the average user of Ethereum apps is high quality.

Ethereum's large user base incentivizes programmers to deploy new services on the network, thus solidifying Ethereum as the primary host for DeFi and NFTs and other decentralized apps.

Ethereum 2.0, a protocol that is backwards-compatible with the current version, will allow for a more scalable network on which to build decentralized apps with higher transaction throughput requirements in the future.