Ethereum Completes Historic Proof-of-Stake Transition

The Ethereum network has completed its transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), marking a historic day for the cryptocurrency. On September 15, 2022, at 06:44 UTC, the Ethereum Mainnet execution layer and the Beacon Chain's consensus layer merged, as planned, at the Terminal Total Difficulty of 587,500,000,000,000,000,000. This change makes Ethereum about 99.95% more energy efficient, according to the Ethereum Foundation.

StarkWare President and co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson noted that the Merge has a dramatic effect on energy consumption. He also believes it is the first step in a process that will lead to widespread adoption of Ethereum, stating: 'It starts a chain reaction of changes. The end result will be the very broad use of Ethereum's computing power, and the general population using blockchain-based apps in many different areas of life.'

The next stages in Ethereum's technical roadmap include the Surge, which will increase scalability for rollups through sharding, the Verge, which will achieve statelessness through Verkle trees, the Purge, which will eliminate historical data and technical debt, and the Splurge, which will involve a number of small miscellaneous upgrades.