Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the Difficulty Bomb, a major milestone leading to the long – awaited Merger upgrade of the Series 1 blockchain.
They set two months as the deadline to “make sure we check all the numbers before choosing a precise timeline and roll – out time,” according to chief developer Tim Beiko in a tweet on June 11.
In short, we agreed with the bomb delay. We’ve already been over time, and we want to make sure we check all the numbers honestly before choosing an exact delay and deployment time, but we aim to achieve a delay of ~ 2 months, and that the upgrade went live in late June.
—Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) June 10, 2022
In short, we accepted the delay of the Difficulty Bomb. We had already passed the deadline, and we want to be sure to check all the numbers before selecting an exact deadline and enrollment time, but we aim for about 2 months, and the update should be live on line at the end of June. – Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) June 10, 2022
The Difficulty Bomb will be a measure to deter ETH miners from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof of work (PoW) to proof of pledge (PoS).
This greatly increases the difficulty for miners in verifying transactions on the network, which will reduce the profitability of PoW miners. Eventually, it will be impossible for PoW miners to validate a block. The Difficulty Bomb is a network feature that was added to the code in 2016 as plans were being made to fuse as a consensus layer (formerly known as ETH 2.0).
The move to PoS is expected to reduce Ethereum network energy demands by up to 99.9% according to some estimates. Other PoS networks, such as Polygon and Fantom Opera, have negligible power demands compared to other PoW networks.
Although Beiko does not mention it, delaying the Fusion Bomb, which is expected to happen in August 2022, could further delay the fusion itself.
Ropsten’s testnet on Ethereum recently completed its own successful transition to PoS on June 9, giving the developers the “first dress rehearsal” for true fusion.
Ethereum adoption continues to grow
Despite the current bearish sentiment in the cryptocurrency markets, Ethereum’s user base remains strong. Daily transactions on the network have remained over one million on a single day since December 2020. Measuring daily transactions provides a simple and accurate overview of the total load handled by the network.
The number of unique addresses continues to rise sharply each month. There has been no slowdown in the number of new unique wallets since the first peak in December 2017. Ethereum now has around 198 million unique wallets, an increase of 14.5x from December 7, 2017.
Read also: Ether Price Enters “Too Sold” Zone For The First Time From November 2018
The price of ETH is down 6.8% along with most other cryptocurrencies in the last 24 hours trading at $ 1,360 according to CoinGecko.
