Last week, in Greece, a meeting of leading Ethereum developers took place, with significant progress toward the Merge.
According to a Beacon Chain developer, ConsenSys’ Ben Edgington, the teams transitioned a devnet to proof-of-stake. Execution clients and consensus clients of Eth1 and Eth2 unite to form a network productive in processing transactions.
This news came after the announcement of Altair about its upgrade by the end of October this year. The Altair upgrade is considered a significant move in the shift to proof-of-stake that would give developers extra functionality on the Beacon Chain. While the Merge (the puzzle) moved slowly from the beginning, it started to fall suddenly into place.
Immediate impacts on the network and users:
Energy efficiency
Proof-of-stake create validators for blocks without using the energy for mining the blocks. It randomly allocates block proposal possibilities to validators, easing some of the prominent competition in proof-of-work.
The demand for expensive mining equipment enables large miners to control the network in terms of energy efficiency.
Ethereum emissions fall
Under proof-of-stake, the economics of Ethereum will change from its current state. In the future, Ether rewards will depend on various circumstances in the network. Still, experts think the emission rate will fall.
Transaction cost/speed
Experts say that the transition to the proof-of-stake agreement will not directly impact transaction speed or gas fees. However, the upgrade will spread the network’s load across 65 new chains, which seem to be a crucial part of Ethereum’s way to scalability.
MEV
Removing miners does not mean that it can remove the Maximal extractable value. Users of the proof-of-stake network and Eth1 clients will still be subject to creating blocks. Therefore, the transaction ordering process will occur in the same way before passing the blocks to Eth2 customers to end the bundled transactions.
