According to CoinDesk, Ethereum’s Goerli testnet completed its Merge at around 01:50 (UTC) on August 11. Goerli is the last of the three Ethereum public testnets, and this is the last Testnet Merge before the Mainnet Merge.
The successful merge of the two previous testnets, Ropsten and Sepolia, has boosted the confidence of the Ethereum community, and the Mainnet Merge is expected to take place sometime in late September, according to the official schedule given by the Ethereum developer team. Driven by the great news, the market cap of Ethereum has rebounded to above $225 billion, and the ETH price, which soared by over 12% in 24 hours, has now reached $1,881.21.
Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko said that they will closely track the performance of Goerli for a few hours after the Goerli Merge. “We want to see the network finalizing and having a high participation rate amongst validators and also make sure we don’t hit any unexpected bugs or issues,” said Beiko. According to Parithosh’s report at the 143rd Ethereum Core Developers Conference, when Goerli was shadow-forked, the validator participation rate dropped from 98% to about 86%.
This is a potential red flag because the participation rate is an indicator used to measure the ratio of the number of validators who generated the witness message (attentation) to the expected number. The lower the participation rate, the small the reward there will be for each validator participating in the network, and the network would become inactive if the participation rate drops to a certain level.
A decent participation rate is anywhere between 80% and 95%. If the rate falls below 67%, the network would not be able to finalize blocks. Fortunately, by the end of the conference, some nodes had started to repair themselves, and the rate was back to about 95%.
As the Goerli Merge goes live, the Ethereum mainnet will soon switch to PoS. In Goerli/Prater Merge Announcement[ https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/07/27/goerli-prater-merge-announcement/
], the Ethereum team explained how this can affect stakers/app developers/Ethereum miners. Here, for your reference, we will discuss some of the impacts stated in the article.
For stakers, participating in the Goerli Merge is highly recommended by the Ethereum team as the Goerli/Prater Merge is your last opportunity to ensure that your validators are correctly configured before the mainnet transition. After receiving the 32 Goerli test coins, validators can then stake the coins on Goerli by calling the contract, which allows them to run a testnet node. Once testnet validators build a Goerli node, they can then try to deploy different kinds of smart contracts or perform other tests/experiences. Therefore, stakers are strongly advised to join the Goerli Merge and try out different operations on the testnet.
The team also strongly encourages app developers to join the Goerli Merge to ensure that their products or tools successfully shift to PoS, while making sure that their front-end code, tooling, deployment pipeline and other off-chain components work as intended. Developers can run through a complete testing & deployment cycle on Goerli, Ropsten or Kiln and report issues to those projects’ maintainers.
Additionally, developers should note that all testnets, apart from Sepolia and Goerli, will be deprecated after the Merge. If you are a user of Ropsten, Rinkeby or Kiln, you should plan to migrate to Goerli or Sepolia.
If the Ethereum mainnet transitioned to PoS, miners would no longer be able to mine $ETH using mining machines, and this billion-dollar industry generating hundreds of millions in revenue every month would disappear into thin air. Therefore, some ETH miners are calling for a hard fork in the Ethereum community. After the Merge, no ETH would be mined on the existing PoW chain due to the difficulty bomb, and the hard fork solution now discussed in the community aims to create a new chain through a hard fork of the PoW chain when the Merge takes place, thereby ensuring that ETH miners may continue to engage in PoW mining on the new chain.
Of course, it’s unclear whether the hard fork proponents are sticking to their belief or merely hyping it up, and users should remain rational when presented with such proposals.