It is still one of the most highly anticipated events in crypto. This upgrade was to occur on September 15, 2022. The long-awaited transition to blockchain was completed. It went from PoW into PoS. To merge both the Ethereum mainnet (Beacon Chain) and create one blockchain, the change will occur.
The Merge has been a topic of discussion and reaction in the Ethereum industry. It is a high-hope event for the Ethereum community. For its part, Ethereum’s developing team completed the required checks that would finally activate Merge.
The reactions to the Merge are intense following the current flow of activities related to the preparation and wait for it. Coinbase is one of the top cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide and has just made some surprising disclosures.
Coinbase Cloud has been identified four possible risks with the Ethereum Merge. There are several risks: technical, operational, client diversity and economic.
The potential risks of Ethereum merging
Coinbase offered details about the risks, based upon its highlights.
Operational risks:Remember that there was an increase in validators and node operators during the Bellatrix. Some of the operators didn’t complete the upgrade for their clients. There are also some activities behind the scenes, such as client releases, testnets and last-minute releases.
Recent developer reports show that just 85% percent of nodes completed all the required and most recent client releases. In addition, there are records of about 25% to 30% of validators that couldn’t complete the Sepolia upgrade. These validators were removed due to problems with their configuration.
Technische RiskMerge is the fusion of two distinct blockchains, Ethereum mainnet and Beacon Chain. The first one is PoW-based, while the second uses PoS. Merge, one of crypto’s most difficult upgrades is due to this. It is therefore highly susceptible to bugs attacks and other technical issues.
One instance of the bugs occurred during the upgrading of Nethermind’s execution layer client and Go Ethereum (geth). However, the developers’ team provided a handy fix and possible guidelines to avoid a repeat.
There is a risk that there will not be enough diversity among clients. A client that lacks diversity could increase the chance of consensus clients being dominant. This client could violate consensus, or use the terms of its agreement to suggest blocks.
Economic Risk The Merge will make miners irrelevant to the Ethereum blockchain, as block production is taken over by validators. A different type of GPU is used for mining Ether than for BTC. You can switch from Ethereum mining to Bitcoin mining. There are many available coins that can be used as an alternative.
Furthermore, issues may arise with protocols or dApps that run on Ethereum PoW fork.
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