The Merge Won’t Bring Ethereum Up to Speed

Ethereum’s so-called Merge generates headlines but it’s not the game-changer it’s touted as.

Even with the Merge, Ethereum won’t be running smart contracts other than tokens on proof-of-stake. They have no idea how to make that work.

“The eth2 roadmap offers scalability, and the earlier phases of eth2 are approaching quickly, but base-layer scalability for applications is only coming as the last major phase of eth2, which is still years away.”

You can read the technical details here.

So we tend to agree with the analysis from this Bank of America research report cited by Coindesk today, stating that while there will be some benefits arising from the Merge, they are too far away from actually providing the benefits of a true PoS protocol with true finalization.

“The transition also acts as a precursor for the ‘Surge,’ the second of the planned upgrades, the note said. That will aim to improve Ethereum’s throughput from around 15 transactions per second (TPS) to about 100,000 TPS while reducing transaction fees, it added.

“Without the scalability improvements, Ethereum is unlikely to remain as the dominant blockchain operating system, the bank said.

…

“The bank added these features will ‘likely be key as the Web 3 ecosystem of decentralized applications emerges.’”

This Merge will not solve Ethereum’s scaling problem, because if you take Ethereum-Magicians at their word, it’s going to be a long time coming. In that time they will lose market position.

This is why we are building Silvermint from the ground up as a PoS protocol. It has the speed and transaction throughput to serve as a proper, secure, and truly decentralized payment medium for daily transactions.

That’s the way forward to Web3.