The merge everyone has been talking about is coming very soon next month. It is exciting news for the web3 space! This year, much progress has been made to merge the beacon chain into the main Ethereum chain we use today.
This merge will lead to a transition from the Proof-of-Work mechanism that has been used since its genesis to the Proof-of-Stake mechanism, which will set the future for what is to come.
What will this mean for Ethereum, especially with gas fees?
So, to keep it real with you, the merger will not profoundly affect the cost of gas fees. Proposed upgrades in the future will start to tackle important topics such as scalability to help reduce gas fees. Ethereum's current focus is to switch its Consensus layer from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake to continue to shift toward that bright future.
Then what will this merge introduce?
This merge will change how the nodes work together to create the blocks for grouped transactions. Instead of miners solving complex computations to verify transactions and create blocks, they will just validate transactions and propose new blocks by staking ETH.
And what is so great about having these nodes stake ETH is it will significantly help reduce the number of bad actors attempting to bring harm to the blockchain.
The amount of ETH you stake as a validator determines your position in the chain. So, for a bad actor to harm the blockchain after the transition to proof of stake, they would have to own over 51% of the ETH on the network to influence the other validators on the chain.
Compared to security with Proof-of-Work, although in-fairness would be pretty hard to do as well, is that all you would need is to have a computer 51% more powerful than all the other nodes on the chain. But needing to control over 51% of the eth staked is tougher than that since they would somehow gain control of each node’s staked ETH.
Not only will this merge beef up security, but it will also be eco-friendly. It has been proposed that after the merge, the energy consumption by Ethereum will be reduced by over 99.95%! This is unbelievably huge not only for web3 but for the environment!
With Proof-of-Stake, you don't need an all-power PC with like a 3090Ti to run a node at the top! If you want to be a validator, all you need to have is a basic laptop and enough eth to stake to get the rewards!
I know that gas fees have been a crucial problem that has arisen in the current version of Ethereum. But with the available layer2 solutions that exist to address scalability issues, network bottleneck, and overall gas fees, there are answers to these problems.
Ethereum wants to make a smooth transition to Proof-of-Stake but, with upgrades, will introduce core features such as sharding to address these core issues, especially gas fees.
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of how the merge will affect gas fees! Stay tuned as there is more to come:)
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