Just-In: Ethereum Merge Most Likely In August, Says Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said on Friday the Ethereum Merge, ie a transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol, will most likely happen by August this year.

Speaking at the ETH Shanghai Web 3.0 Developer Summit, Buterin said that in case of potential risks, a delay to September or October is possible.

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Merge is Expected in August

During the virtual summit, Vitalik Buterin shared an overview of the Ethereum protocol, the ETH Merge, and happenings related to scaling and other improvements. He shared the benefits of the transition to PoS such as an improved Ethereum ecosystem and more applications.

“We have been working on proof-of-stake for about 7 years now. But finally, all of that work is coming together. If everything goes well, then the likely plan is for the merge to happen in the summer.”

The biggest development towards Ethereum Merge happened this week. The merge of Ropsten-beacon chain on the Ethereum test network, with genesis on May 30 and transition on June 8.

Vitalik Buterin shared the updated roadmap of Ethereum protocol regarding the completion of the consensus layer and execution layer featuring the beacon chain, PoS light client, and EIP 1559. The team is working on longer-term features such as single secret leader election, single-slot confirmations, and better signature aggregation.

He also shared developments in “The Surge” for increasing scalability for rollups through sharding and “The Verge” for statelessness through Verkle Trees and related features. The completion of these will let users do a large number of transactions and make it easier to run an Ethereum node even without a powerful computer with more hard drive space. Also, it will be easier to be a validator, making the protocol more decentralized.

Furthermore, “The Purge” and “The Splurge” were discussed, which will make Ethereum simplify by eliminating historical data and technical debt.

However, he asserts the completion of the Merge and the Surge will be enough for Ethereum. The team will continue to make Ethereum simpler, safer, and secure.

Ethereum Founder on LUNA and UST Fails

Vitalik Buterin believes earlier DeFi and stablecoin projects are very good. However, some projects have not worked such as LUNA and UST for making too many optimizations. Actually, the plan of making a stablecoin without collateral doesn’t fit. The UST stablecoin survived during the bull market, but failed in the bear market.

Moreover, he shared his paper on non-transferable “soulbound” tokens for the Web3 ecosystem.