There is no end to the rumours surrounding the highly anticipated launch of the new Merge update that will move ETH towards a cheaper sustainable and scalable PoS system instead of the current energy-intensive PoW.
Summary
The Merge update will not meet the June date
While a developer of the highly-anticipated new update had said in the past few days that the end date of late June for its release would be respected, now a developer on Twitter has stated that it is highly unlikely that the end of June will be the date of Merge‘s release.
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
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) April 12, 2022
Tim Beiko, the developer’s name, wrote two days ago on Twitter in response to a question from a miner:
“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”.
Adrian might be the only person in the world who has built both an EL & CL client from scratch *and* who has bought _multiple_ devcon tickets in the open sales!
He’s a 🐐whose opinion you should overweight ⚖️ https://t.co/uqvU8OiDLl
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) April 14, 2022
In short, it seems that the problems encountered in recent months are not yet overcome and this is delaying the release of the expected update. According to a developer who has experienced some of the steps, the release of the Merge will not take place before 2023.
“It’s kind of a recurring theme in the ETH mining community how proof-of-stake has been ‘almost here’ for years, but this time it’s true that we’re getting closer to the end”.
He commented on Reddit.
The causes of the delay of the Merge
The problem is that the new delay could increase the loss of dApps and developers who in the past few months have abandoned the expensive blockchain to move to blockchains like Cardano, Avalanche and Solana that are cheaper, faster and scale better than Ethereum.
With the great development of DeFi and NFTs, the demand for fast and cheap blockchains has grown by leaps and bounds. Ethereum still maintains the leadership with about 80% of the market. But in the last year it has reportedly lost more than 10% of the market.
This is all to the benefit of blockchains such as Cardano, Solana and Polkadot, which in 2021 were among the cryptocurrencies with the highest gains due to their ability to attract DeFi and NFT projects, to the detriment of Ethereum.
