Ethereum is moving closer to its landmark PoS upgrade

After successfully transitioning its Ropsten and Sepolia testnets to PoS earlier this summer, Ethereum has finally merged its third largest testnet Goerli with the PoS Beacon Chain Prater, marking a crucial step toward the much anticipated historical Ethereum mainnet merge, which is planned to take place in September 2022.

1-2 blocks to go!
— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🐼 (@TimBeiko) August 11, 2022

The final Goerli merge was executed in two-step upgrades, according to the Ethereum Foundation July’s blog post. The first consensus layer upgrade called Bellatrix, which prepared the Goerli testnet for the final merge, took place on August 4th. The second execution layer upgrade named Paris was successfully implemented Wednesday at 1:45 AM UTC after the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) reached 10,790,000, on the Goerli testnet. The Goerli Merge will be the final chance for users to ensure that their PoS validators operate smoothly before the mainnet merges with the Beacon chain.

This merge will transform the current Ethereum’s highly energy-consuming mining process into a PoS algorithm, expected to imply a 99.9% reduction in energy usage as well as improve the network’s scalability.

Following the merge, the price of ETH also saw a significant spike, as of the time of this writing it is trading at $1,893.35, gaining 12% over the last 24 hours.