After Goerli, the network’s third and last testnet, successfully transitioned to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism on Wednesday evening, Ethereum is now entering the final stages of preparations for the eagerly anticipated Merge event. As a result of the interest in the Goerli merging, ETH has increased 14% in the past day as of this writing.
The Sepolia testnet made a similar transfer at the start of July, following the successful PoS transitions of the Ropsten testnet earlier this summer in June.
The Goerli testnet merge was announced at the end of July, and it took place in two stages, starting on August 4 with the mandatory Bellatrix upgrade. Today, once the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) on the Goerli chain reached 10,790,000, the second stage, known as Paris, was activated.
The execution layer client switched to proof-of-stake at this second stage of the upgrade, and the next block was created by a validator running on the Beacon Chain PoS network, which coexists with Ethereum‘s mainnet.
Goerli, a testnet environment for Web3 developers to evaluate blockchain applications before releasing them on the Ethereum mainnet, differs from Ropsten and Sepolia in that it ran on the proof of authority (PoA) consensus algorithm rather than the proof of work consensus algorithm before today’s switch.
By requiring node operators to update both their consensus layer and execution layer clients at once as opposed to just one of the two, today’s Goerli merging differs from the early testnet integration.
The Goerli Merge, according to the Ethereum Foundation, is the last chance for users to make sure their PoS validators are set up properly before the mainnet switchover.
The Ethereum mainnet is anticipated to formally merge with the Beacon chain next month, with a soft deadline of September 19. It will also act as the last test run until that time.