The historical Ethereum merge to PoS just happened, here is how it went

After postponing the date for the historical event numerous times, in June Ethereum updated its Ropsten testnet to support PoS. Sepolia, and Goerli testnests got updated in July and August respectively, and finally – about a week ago the Bellatrix hardfork went live on the Beacon Chain.

Paris, as the execution layer’s transition from PoW to PoS is named, got triggered today by a specific threshold called Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) that was set at 58750000000000000000000, just as planned. Once the Ethereum mainnet reached the target TTD, the next block on the network got finalized by a Beacon Chain validator. Nevertheless, Ethereum core developers are still monitoring the network, observing whether the operators of the new Ethereum PoS network are behaving as expected and pushing new transactions to the blockchain, before announcing the complete success of the Ethereum merge.

Ethereum 2.0 as many refer to the Ethereum PoS network should have far lower gas fees than the Ethereum 1.0 PoW network and is supposed to have less environmental impact due to requiring less energy for the creation of new blocks. At the time of writing this article, all Ethereum blocks are being produced within the expected pace of roughly 12 seconds between each of them by randomly selected validators, there have been no empty blocks and the Ethereum merge to PoS can be considered a success.