The Great Merge: Ethereum Goes Proof-of-Stake

If you’ve been following crypto news at all for the last month you’ve probably heard about The Merge. If you haven’t, then you might have at least wondered why Ethereum has been steadily inching up the last few weeks after a rather grim year so far price-wise.

This series of upgrades is scheduled to start on September 6, and at the end Ethereum’s Mainnet will merge with the Beacon Chain to become a proof-of-stake network. This means ETH will no longer be mined, and validator nodes will need to upgrade to the new consensus model.

The benefits of this change are largely in energy consumption. Proof-of-stake uses 99% less power than proof-of-work since it does not rely on intensive computing power to process transactions.

For traders, this change will have very little immediate effect. Your balances in Ethereum and ERC20 coins won’t change and you won’t need to do anything to convert. For Cryptal specifically, Ethereum trading is expected to be suspended for a short time during the actual merge, estimated to happen around September 15, but soon after that everything will return to normal.

For more technical details and to follow along with the Ethereum community on what’s happening, check out the Ethereum blog where all their latest updates are posted: https://blog.ethereum.org/

For our latest announcements concerning Ethereum and ERC20 tokens, watch this page on our support site: https://support.cryptal.com/hc/en-us/articles/5748324300700