Ethereum has just rolled out a major new update titled Gray Glacier. This hard fork sends the “trouble bomb” back to 100 days. According to the developers who participated in the deployment of these new features, everything went successfully.
So Gray Glacier is the update that happened overnight from Thursday to Friday with a view to predicting The Merge, ie the switch between PoW and PoS, by October if no delays are noticed.
The difficulty bomb responds to the difficulty, both planned and sudden, associated with Ethereum mining as soon as the update is done. This “trouble bomb” will increase the difficulty of mining, making it de facto impossible to mine a new block.
Repel the difficulty bomb
The Gray Glacier update was necessary after the transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) was postponed. At the start, the trouble bomb was due to be in place by the end of June. Behind this name is actually a system to reduce energy costs for new blocks.
Ethereum is an energy-intensive cryptocurrency. This bomb of difficulty, therefore, aims to force miners to take proof of the issue by making the equations to be solved to make mining new blocks impossible.
Thanks to this hard fork that implemented the Gray Glacier update, the difficulty bomb has pushed back about 700,000 blocks, which equates to about an additional 100 days of relief. So the developers have until next October to complete The Merge and fully implement this solution to get Ethereum 2.0.
The update was successfully deployed
Ethereum developer confirmed on Twitter update success. The goal of the difficulty bomb is to gradually entice miners into work proof mining (PoW) to lead them to proof of promise.
It was necessary postpone deployment bomb trouble at the moment, because it is still a complicated operation to implement. Moreover, if it failed, it would make it almost impossible to mine new blocks or make new system updates.
This is not the first time that the trouble bomb, after much delay on The Merge, has been returned. This was already the case with the update Arrow Glacier which occurred in December 2021.
It is therefore difficult to judge whether the Merger will take place as agreed towards the end of the year or whether there will be further delays … So we will have to be patient and wait for the developers’ announcements on this matter.
Crypto-assets are a risky investment.
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