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Ethereum’s third and final testnet merge goes live on Goerli

Ethereum’s third and final testnet merge goes live on Goerli
Image Credits: Faisal Khan/Medium

The Goerli testnet has completed its Merge, successfully transitioning from a proof-of-authority to a proof-of-stake consensus on Wednesday evening.

Following the Ropsten testnet merge in June, and the Sepolia testnet merge in July, Goerli is the last of the three public testnets that were due to go live before the Ethereum Merge takes place in mid-September.

Having been announced at the end of July, the Goerli testnet merge happened in two phases: the Bellatrix beacon chain upgrade, which took place on August 4th, and the Paris upgrade, which will be triggered once the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) on the Goerli chain reaches 10,790,000.

The Ethereum Merge will see the current Ethereum blockchain merging with the proof-of-stake beacon chain, shifting the network from mining to staking, where Ethereum holders can deposit their ETH in exchange for rewards. 

After the switch, the Ethereum network will take much less energy to run, make it easier for people to participate in running the network as validators, and decrease the issuance of ETH by about 90%, causing a phenomenon known as the ‘Triple Halvening’, which will significantly spike its market value.

Another major update that the Ethereum Merge will introduce is “sharding”, which is a way to divide up the network into multiple chains. As the Ethereum Foundation puts it: “With shard chains, validators only need to store/run data for the shard they’re validating, not the entire network (like what happens today). This speeds things up and drastically reduces hardware requirements.”

Once the Merge is complete, the Eth2 sharded chains upgrade will go live early in 2023.

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