Ethereum will merge in August with the start of final tests

The next major update of the Ethereum network (quotation ETH) will take place in August, developer Preston Van Loon said during a panel at the Permissionless conference.

"As far as we know, if all goes according to plan, August makes sense," he said before adding, "If we don't have to move [the trouble bomb], let's do it as soon as possible."

Merge is a milestone that transforms the Ethereum network consensus mechanism from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake (PoS). This is a significant step as it will reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by more than 99%, which should keep critics, politicians and environmentalists at bay.

The difficulty bomb is a mechanism that increases the level of difficulty or complexity of the "puzzles" in the proof-of-work mining algorithm. When the calculations get more difficult, block times are longer than standard and the rewards for miners are lower.

Final phase of fusion tests

This week the developers of the Ethereum client announced the final phase of testing, in which the Merge will be deployed on the Ropsten test network. Ropsten is the closest development network to the real thing, so it will be able to rigorously test Merge and PoS. According to the developers of the Ethereum client, testing on Ropsten will begin on June 8.

However, the Merge will not reduce gas tariffs, as this will only happen when scale upgrades such as sharding are implemented. Earlier this month, average transaction fees jumped to around $ 200 following the launch of an over-hyped non-fungible token collection (NFT) on the net. The high cost of using Ethereum under high load conditions has been the bane of many users, and the Merge won't give much relief to this.

Scale upgrades such as the EIP-4844 are also under development. The latter takes the side chain concept one step further and introduces a new type of transaction called "Proto-Danksharding" which processes "blobs" of data to improve blockchain throughput.

In addition to the environmental benefits, another positive aspect of the merger is the reduction of ETH emissions. There will be no more mining of Ethereum and the transaction fee burn mechanism introduced with EIP-1559 should lead to a deflationary issue of the asset.

ETH prices falling

The positive fundamentals have done little for ETH prices as bears are still in control of the cryptocurrency markets. Ethereum gained 3,6% on the day, topping $ 2.000 again, but it was battered this month.

Over the past fortnight, the asset has lost a painful 26% plunging it to 58% below its November all-time high of $ 4.878, according to CoinGecko. ETH is unlikely to see bullish momentum until a broader turnaround occurs in the overall cryptocurrency market.