In brief:
- A community member of the r/ethstaker Reddit community has predicted that Ethereum’s merge could happen in June of this year
- The prediction outlined five reasons as to why June was a plausible timeframe for the merge between the current Ethereum mainnet using Proof-of-work, with the Beacon chain that uses Proof-of-Stake
The highly anticipated switch of Ethereum from a proof-of-work network to a proof-of-stake algorithm has been scheduled for launch in the second quarter of 2022. The process will involve merging the existing Ethereum mainnet with the Beacon chain of the Ethereum 2.0 system.
However, an exact date for ‘the merge’ has not been provided leading one Reddit member (u/superphiz) of the r/ethstaker community to predict that it will happen in June of this year.
In an elaborate post on Reddit, u/superphiz outlines the following five reasons as to why June is a logical month for the merge to occur.
Firstly, on February 19th and at EthDenver, Ethereum researcher and implementation organizer, Danny Ryan, gave a talk where he explained that the merge was very close. He also added that ‘the difficulty bomb..is set to go off…to begin to be felt…sometime in June, sometime in July’. According to u/superphiz, Danny Ryan was hinting that the difficulty bomb will not be adjusted in June.
Secondly, during the Consensus Layer call #83 on March 10th, the discussion around the launch of the Kiln Tesnet implied that its launch was within days. u/superphiz pointed out that ‘the fact that implementers are counting days tells us that they are working diligently to meet the June goal’. The Kiln testnet is meant to be the last major testnet before the merge and will run for three months.
Thirdly, the Merge Mainnet Readiness Checklist is nearing completion with the most difficult items having been completed. Therefore, the merge should happen soon.
Fourthly, on March 10th, Marius Van Der Wijden announced the launch of the Kiln public merge testnet. u/superphiz pointed out the significance of this announcement through the following statement:
Anyone who has observed these events before will know that those testnets are merged with a launch-ready product. While I don’t know the planned timing for those testnet launches, it is very reasonable to expect a two week delay between each testnet merge.
Coincidentally, the configs for the Kiln testnet were announced today, March 11th.
Lastly, the aforementioned difficulty bomb that is expected to ‘explode’ around June 2022, is an incentive for developers to either implement the merge or do a hard fork to postpone it again.
Summing it up, the merge of the Ethereum mainnet with the Beacon chain of Ethereum 2.0 is scheduled to happen sometime in the second quarter of 2022. The exact date is unknown but June looks probable due to the pending difficulty bomb happening then, and the ongoing progress in developing and testing the Beacon Chain.