The Ethereum mainnet merge is now less than 9 days away (yes, really) and the final pre-merge upgrade, Bellatrix, was successfully completed just a couple of hours ago. Due to this, many people are wondering what they need to do to be ‘merge ready’ and well the good news is that unless you’re a solo staker - you don’t need to do much at all!

sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 @sassal0x

All of my validators are merge ready 🐼

September 6th 2022

20 Retweets387 Likes

Now, if you are a solo staker, then by now you should’ve followed the ‘Merge Readiness Checklist’ and ensured that all of the relevant tasks have been completed. If you haven’t done this yet then at this point your validators will be offline and you’ll be losing ETH via the inactivity leak (you should go fix this right now)! Though from what I can see on Beaconcha.in, only about 5% of validators fell off the network at time of the Bellatrix upgrade which is an amazing result (I expect these validators to quickly come back online as well).

Now, as for The Merge itself, the great thing for regular users is that to be “merge ready” they don’t have to do anything at all. Since The Merge is only altering the consensus engine of the Ethereum network, regular users will be able to use the network post-merge just as they did before the merge (same wallets, same transaction flow, same fees - everything). The only difference regular users may feel is the fact that layer 1 blocks will be slightly faster post-merge (exactly 12 seconds instead of around 13 seconds).

As for any potential issues with The Merge, there’s not actually much that can go catastrophically wrong. I would say that the “worst case scenario” would be if the chain just halts because the switchover from PoW to PoS didn’t work at all - this would then require some sort of coordinated human intervention to fix. Though if we see things like validators dropping off the network due to configuration issues, missed blocks/slots or some clients having major bugs, these things wouldn’t be cause for major concern as they are relatively easy to recover from.

The Merge only happens once and will be a historic moment for not just the Ethereum movement, but all of crypto. It’s the first time a major Proof of Work chain is doing a live transition to Proof of Stake and it is the most significant upgrade in Ethereum’s history. Finally, after a very long research and development phase, we are less than 9 days away from Ethereum becoming a full Proof of Stake network.

The Merge is coming - are you ready for it?

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.