Today, the Bellatrix Upgrade is set to take place, the last upgrade before the Ethereum Merge. According to data from Ethernodes, 73.5% of Ethereum nodes have updated their consensus layer clients to comply with the Bellatrix upgrade prior to epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain, which was set to take place on 11:34:47 am UTC on Sept. 6, 2022.
As for the rest of the node operators, which are yet to upgrade to Geth v1.10.23 or higher, the Ethereum Foundation noted they “will be stuck on an incompatible chain following old rules and will be unable to send Ether or operate on the post-Merge Ethereum network.”
During the Bellatrix upgrade, the Beacon Chain prepares for the consensus switch as it introduces a new parameter, the ‘execution payload’, which is needed for validators to start creating mainnet blocks, which contain the necessary codebase for merging the two layers.
After the Bellatrix upgrade, the Paris event will be triggered when the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) reaches 58750000000000000000000, estimated to occur around September 15, triggering the Merge.
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