The Ethereum Merge Goes Live Officially, ETH Price Struggles Around $1,600

The highly anticipated and much-awaited event of Ethereum Merge finally went live today with the Ethereum Proof-of-Work (PoW) officially merging with the Proof-of-Stake Beacon Chain.

With this, the Ethereum blockchain officially completes the transition to the Proof-of-Stake (Pos) blockchain network. The Paris upgrade, the final one for the Merge to happen just went through at a Total Terminal Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000.

The transition of Ethereum to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network makes the blockchain more scalable, efficient, and environmental friendly. With the PoS transition, the Ethereum blockchain will supposedly consume 99% less energy than the current state.

However, the transition of Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake keeps miners out of business entirely. Now, miners will no more be validating the transition rather stakers and validators.

Since its inception in 2014, the Ethereum blockchain has been the leading platform for all decentralized applications. Although, the Ethereum network has faced its own share of difficulties in terms of network congestion and high gas fee, no other blockchain platform has attained adoption to the scale of Ethereum.

However, the current version of Ethereum still support basic smart contract functionality. But Ethereum developers have been working to bring new functionality which will allow the smart contracts to create their own tokens.

Besides, Ethereum is also working to bring new programming language which will allow developers to bring more robust decentralized applications. This new language will make it easier to write secure code which could make is easier for newbies to build on the platform.

The good thing about Ethereum Merge is that the underlying technology is backward compatible. It means that developers who build applications on the current version of Ethereum can move the code to the new network without having to make any major changes.

Now the bigger question among Ethereum enthusiasts is what’s next? The Ethereum developers have a major task ahead of them in terms of improving transactional throughput and scalability. After the Merge has happened, the Ethereum network will undergo through four planned phases. This includes The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge.

The ETH price has been rallying in the last few weeks following in the optimism surrounding the Merge. Currently, ETH is trading at a price of $1,600.