Ethereum Developers Raise Concerns Ahead of Highly Anticipated Merge

Some Ethereum developers have been expressing concerns about the network’s upcoming ‘Merge,’ a transition from proof of work to proof of stake consensus.

Péter Szilágyi, a Team Lead at an open-source platform, Ethereum, pointed out a bug in the Geth 1.10.22,  Go Ethereum’s latest update, that can “causes the trie/state to go bad.”

An Ethereum Core Developer at Ethereum research and engineering company Nethermind Daniel C shared that their team had similar issues, and that’s why they went into “a strict stabilization phase” before the Merge, which means “only fixes to the master branch” are being merged right now.

Szilágyi later confirmed that Ethereum developers found the reason behind the bug, which, according to the developer, means anyone running the release “will have their db fried,” adding that data loss only happens on shutdown and provided and providing the latest release, a “hotfix” for Geth 1.10.22 called Sentry Omega.

The open-source project Go Ethereum, run by Ethereum developers on GitHub, has been updating the community and communicating issues the network might be experiencing.    

Ethereum’s Merge is one of the most anticipated events in the crypto industry. It is an upgrade that will shift the Ethereum blockchain from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS). The shift is expected to increase the network’s efficiency in speed and decrease energy consumption by as much as 99.5%.

The official Merge launch date has finally been announced by the Ethereum Foundation – the upgrade is set to take place between Sept.10-20.

The Bellatrix upgrade, which begins the final countdown, is expected to go live on Sept. 6.

Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder, has always advocated for the proof-of-stake protocol. In his blog post from November 2020, he outlined reasons why he believes PoS is better than PoW, including security, which in his opinion, is more secure “for the same cost,” more decentralization, and attacks which PoS “makes it easier to recover from.” 

Despite the fact that the network might not be fully ready yet, with possible hiccups on the way, the community remains very optimistic about what one of the major events in the industry means, with support pouring from Reddit users, Mark Cuban, and crypto companies.