‘Happy Merge All’: Vitalik Buterin Officially Confirms Arrival of Ethereum’s Upgrade

The Merge has slashed Ethereum blockchain’s power consumption by 99.95 percent.

Written by Radhika Parashar, Edited by Richa Sharma | Updated: 15 September 2022 14:50 IST

‘Happy Merge All’: Vitalik Buterin Officially Confirms Arrival of Ethereum’s Upgrade

Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Shubham Dhage

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was among several to celebrate the Merge upgrade

Highlights

The Merge upgrade makes Ethereum energy-efficient
The Merge has been in the works for over a year
The upgrade is being celebrated widely by the crypto community

The 'Merge' — the much-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain — finally completed on September 15, marking a historic milestone in the blockchain and crypto industries. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum announced the launch of the Merge on Twitter, calling this a "big moment" for the Ethereum ecosystem. Essentially, now the Ethereum blockchain has transitioned to an energy-efficient ‘proof-of-stake (POS)' mining model from its previous, power intensive ‘proof-of-work (POW)' mining model. This upgrade has slashed Ethereum blockchain's power consumption by 99.95 percent.

Developers who worked on this Merge upgrade believe that this revamp will make the Ethereum network, which is most commercialised and handles billions of dollars in transactions and holdings, more scalable and secure.

“And we finalised!” wrote Buterin in his Twitter post.

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And we finalized!

Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was among several others from the blockchain community to welcome Ethereum's Merge upgrade.

Merge successful. POS activated.

We are all still here.
— CZ :large_orange_diamond: Binance (@cz_binance) September 15, 2022

THE #ETHEREUM MERGE WAS A SUCCESS!
— Altcoin Daily (@AltcoinDailyio) September 15, 2022

Truly an incredible technological feat – congrats Ethereum community on the merge!
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) September 15, 2022

The process of re-coding Ethereum into the POS model has been a long one, filled with several technical roadblocks which led to several delays to the Merge launch.

Projects and blockchain firms reliant on Ethereum now have to choose if their operations would solely run on the Merge upgrade or manage this efficient version with the previous energy-intensive one.

OpenSea, Tether and Circle Pay — the issuer of USD Coin — have already pledged to only rely on the Merge version of Ethereum going forward.

Recently, a DappRadar report has alerted the crypto community to get their Ethereum-related affairs in order because the stablecoins and transactions backed on the Ethereum blockchain could encounter some snags.

Meanwhile, the bug bounty payouts for Ethereum can now go as high as $1 million (roughly Rs. 8 crore), developers of the blockchain said in a recent update, encouraging software developers to keep an eye out on potential risks around the newly launched upgrade.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Merge, Vitalik Buterin

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More