Upgrade Had Only Minor Setbacks, Submittor Malfunction Alleged
The upgrade had only minor setbacks, which were alleged thought to be due to some submittor malfunction.
The long-awaited Merge upgrade has been implemented on Ethereum's public testnet Sepolia, which is the second major testnet to do so. This brings the entire protocol closer to changing its consensus mechanism from proof of work (POW) to proof of stake (POS).
- The upgrade involved "merging" the existing Sepolia POW chain with the POS-based beacon chain. The beacon chain, or "consensus layer," launched in December of 2020 and can only be used to stake ETH.
- At 2 pm UTC on Wednesday, node operators on both the POW and POS chains upgraded their software after collaborating.
- In this experiment, the researchers wanted to see if the validator nodes from each chain were compatible. A similar test was run on Ethereum's Ropsten testnet in early June, and it was mostly successful.
- Terence Tsao, a core developer of Ethereum, described Wednesday's upgrade as a success.
- When the Parity Ethereum merger occurred, about 25%-30% of validators were unable to connect to the network because of their configurations. They have since updated their software.
- "There's no client bug. These hiccups won't hold up the merge," he said.
- Switching Ethereum to proof of stake is expected to make the network much more efficient, in terms of both its energy consumption and transaction processing speed.
- At the moment, it's quite common to see Ethereum transactions fail. In May alone, over 1 million transactions that had already been paid for failed to process.
- Bitcoiners are hesitant to transition their network to a POS mechanism, believing the model to be prone to corporate capture. In an attempt to encourage the move, CFTC chief Rostin Benham seeks smart mining regulation and incentives.
