The long-awaited Ethereum Merge has been delayed yet again, with developers working on the upgrade anticipating a completion date of “a few months after” June.
Because of the success of testing, there was reasonable anticipation that the Ethereum Merge would be completed by mid-year, but the latest setback is unsurprising considering that Proof of Stake has been repeatedly delayed since it was first proposed.
Nonetheless, all indications point to the Ethereum mainnet merging with the beacon chain to form a Proof-of-Stake network this year.
Ethereum Merge won’t be in June
Ethereum developer Tim Beiko updated the timeline on Twitter yesterday, noting that the core devs are in the home stretch:
“It won’t be June, but likely in the few months after. No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of PoW on Ethereum.”
Beiko followed up today by stating “that it can be hard to parse the progress on The Merge when you aren’t deep in the process,” after noticing that his statements made a stir among Ethereum fans and critics alike.
A particular date will not be set until “client teams are confident that the software implementations have been thoroughly tested and are bug-free,” according to the developer.
Trial runs of public test nets like Kiln, as well as the rollout of shadow forks, which allow developers to test various merge/PoS-related technologies on the network, are important to these later stages.
Risk of more delays
Another key reason is the difficulty bomb (an automated increase in mining difficulty designed to make PoW mining less appealing), which Beiko predicts will be visible on Ethereum in May and will make blocks “unbearably (read 15-20 seconds) slow by August.”
Beiko proposed two methods for delaying the difficulty bomb in order to usher in the Merging upgrade ahead of time, the first of which was to combine a bomb delay with merge client updates to postpone the “bomb at a certain block, restoring 13s block times, and then activate The Merge shortly after.”
Second, prior to the Ethereum Merge, separate the bomb delay by network upgrade “which only delays the difficulty bomb.”