Ethereum Jumps 12% as Merge Event Fast Approaches

Ether rises by double-digits this morning, as the upcoming transition of the second-largest cryptocurrency has pinned the hopes of investors.

Ethereum (ETH) gained 12.76% over the past 24 hours, soaring past $1,200. This bullish price movement can most likely be attributed to the successful testing of one of the last tests before the Merge by Ethereum’s core developers yesterday.

What is The Merge?

The Merge refers to an upgrade in which Ethereum switches its consensus mechanism from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which uses far less power and should make the network about 99% more energy-efficient, making Ethereum faster and cheaper to use. For quite a while Ethereum has been beleaguered by long transaction times and high costs. The Ethereum community has been working on the transition to Proof-of-Stake ever since the blockchain launched in 2015.

Ethereum has successfully completed one of the last tests required

Today, 15th July, Ethereum has deployed the latest shadow fork en route to test a specific feature before its transition to Proof-of-Stake.

The mainnet version of Ethereum, supporting transactions and smart contracts, will merge with the Beacon Chain. Once the Merge is complete, Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work will disappear, and mining will be gone forever.

After the official transition, which is planned for September of this year, we will eventually be able to run smart contracts on mainnet Ethereum using Proof-of-Stake rather than Proof-of-Work, and withdraw any ETH staked on Ethereum 2.0. However, a post-merge “cleanup” upgrade announcement should come before any action.

Source: Decrypt. All right reserved.