During a Consensus Layer Call which streamed last Thursday, developers confirmed that the highly-anticipated Ethereum Merge will take place on September 15-16th as scheduled. 

Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko later confirmed in a tweet that the mainnet launch will go live once a targeted Total Terminal Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000 is reached. 

The Merge has been delayed several times, most recently in June, despite a successful “shadow fork test”, a term which refers to the process of copying data from a mainnet network to a testnet, where developers can test features before deploying it to the Ethereum network, and again in May, after Preston Van Loon, a core developer of the Ethereum network, announced at the Permissionless conference that it will be happening sometime in August.

Now that the Goerli testnet has successfully transitioned from a proof-of-authority to a proof-of-stake consensus on Wednesday evening, all that’s left for the Merge to go live is for the final upgrade, known as “Paris”, to take place on September 15th. This will happen when Ethereum’s hash rate (a measure of a network’s computing power) reaches a certain level.

The Ethereum Merge is expected to make the network faster, more scalable and more energy-efficient. By merging with the proof-of-stake beacon chain, the network will shift from mining to staking, where Ethereum holders can deposit their ETH in exchange for rewards.

The transition will also make it easier for users to participate in running the network, enabling further decentralization and heightened security, and decrease the issuance of ETH by about 90%.

Ethereum has been increasing in value in the weeks leading up to the Merge, marking the community’s excitement about the event, and is expected to increase even further once the ‘Triple Halvening’ takes a place, a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon caused by the Merge.