Ethereum is closing towards the most-awaited event in crypto history – The Merge. With less than a month to go, there have been several developments in the blockchain network. Preparing for The Merge, developers have revealed the Ethereum Merge roadmap, giving us an insight into what to expect.
However, before talking about the roadmap, let’s take a look at what Ethereum has already integrated to prepare for the blockchain consensus algorithm transition.
- ‘London’ hard fork (August 5, 2021)
- Altair upgrade (October 27, 2021)
- Arrow Glacier (December 9, 2021)
- Ethereum merged on Kiln testnet (March 16, 2022)
- Ropsten testnet merged (June 8, 2022)
- Gray Glacier upgrade (June 30, 2022)
- Sepolia testnet merged (July 6, 2022)
- Goerli testnet merged (August 10, 2022)
- Mainnet shadow forks 1-10 (starting April 12, 2022)
All of these network updates were released to prepare for The Merge. Now let’s see what’s next.
Ethereum’s Merge Roadmap
Ethereum is preparing for two unprecedented updates before The Merge, according to the support team.
- Bellatrix
- Paris
Unlike previous updates that needed the node operators to update their consensus layer or execution layer, such as Geth, The Merge needs all operators to upgrade both layers to the merge-compatible version.
These two updates will be activated in two different phases to ease the core transition of the Ethereum mainnet to the Beacon Chain.
The Bellatrix upgrade will be passed at an epoch height of 144896 on the Beacon chain, which is estimated to happen around September 6, at 11:34 UTC. The Paris upgrade is scheduled to trigger at the total terminal difficulty of “58750000000000000000000,” immediately before the merge begins around September 10 – 20th. The estimated date for the TTD might change based on the network’s hash rate.
Upon completion of these upgrades, the subsequent blocks of the Ethereum network will be created by validators on the beacon chain.
“Once the execution layer reaches or exceeds the TTD, the subsequent block will be produced by a Beacon Chain validator. The Merge transition is considered complete once the Beacon Chain finalizes this block. Under normal network conditions, this will happen 2 epochs (or ~13 minutes) after the first post-TTD block is produced,” the team wrote.