Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) — the blockchain that introduced Turing-complete smart contracts to the world — is about to take yet another step towards its transition to the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol as part of Ethereum 2.0 development.
What Happened: A recent announcement by the Ethereum Foundation reads "Ropsten will be the first longstanding testnet to run through The Merge."
But what is "The Merge" and should we all be scared of it? In this article, we'll explain what The Merge is and what it means for the future of the Ethereum ecosystem.
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Ropsten is Ethereum's oldest "testnet" — shorthand for test network — which has been widely used by protocol developers to test new features to reduce how likely it is to create problems on Ethereum's main network. If you root for Ethereum, you should be happy every time the Ropsten network misbehaves following an update — it means that it did its job properly by showing a problem in code before it made its way onto the main network.
What Ropsten is about to undergo is much more significant than "just another update." This is the test of the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to PoS — a moment that has been years in the work and one of the most significant moments of transitions to Ethereum 2.0.
Ethereum's network is now divided into two parallel blockchains: the PoW blockchain and the PoS beacon chain, but the developers intend to only leave the latter running with all activity moving there. This transition will be tested on the Ropsten testnet — which has its own PoW network and a PoS beacon chain — triggered by the PoW blockchain's mining difficulty reaching a certain value called "terminal total difficulty," or TDD. Hitting the TTD will trigger the transition execution code codenamed Paris and blocks from there on will be only produced by the beacon chain.
Since the Ropsten network's hashrate is extremely unstable, forecasting its mining difficulty over the long term is impractical. For this reason, developers have first used an arbitrarily high value that would not be reached and then changed it earlier this week, noting that "The Merge" is expected to take place on June 8 or 9.
TLDR: Ropsten will completely transition to PoS with new code so that when the time comes for Ethereum's main network to do the same, everyone will know what to expect and that the code worked through the transition at least once before then.
Photo: Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock
