Ethereum's Ropsten Testnet Merge Is Complete

Ethereum has completed The Merge on a public testnet for the first time, comprising a major milestone in its roadmap towards Proof-of-Stake.

On June 8 at 1210pm ET, Ropsten transitioned from Proof-of-Work consensus to Proof-of-Stake, unifying the testnet’s existing execution layer with the Ropsten Beacon Chain’s PoS consensus layer.

Ethereum developers celebrated the Merge on a livestream hosted by ETHStaker and will now monitor the blockchain for any inconsistencies.

Next Steps

Ethereum’s core developers will next deploy the chain-merge on two more public testnets — Sepolia and Goerli — plus complete several more shadow forks on dedicated closed testnets. At that point, The Merge will be deemed ready for prime-time on mainnet.

Significant Milestone

The Merge is the most significant upgrade in Ethereum’s history. The transition to Proof-of-Stake consensus will usher in a 99% reduction in the network’s energy consumption alongside a 90% drop in ETH issuance to validators.

Combined with base transaction fees being burned since the introduction of EIP-1559 last August, the upgrade is expected to result in more ETH being destroyed than created, making Ether increasingly scarce over time.

The Merge is a substantial change in supply / demand forces most people underestimate.

Multiple $Ms of daily sell pressure on $ETH will be replaced by buy pressure. Every day we will need new sellers to prevent the price from going… up!

Let that sink in.

More details: 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/f6Nym863gI

— korpi (@korpi87) June 7, 2022

The Ethereum Foundation recently urged devs to deploy their code on Ropsten to check if their protocols are operating normally and to report any issues identified as a result of The Merge. Top dapps including leading money market Aave and decentralized social graph Lens launched Ropsten deployments to help test the merge.

Gnosis Chain, an Ethereum scalability solution previously known as xDai, is also gearing up for its own chain-merge. The upgrade will see its Proof-of-Authority-based EVM chain merge with the Proof-of-Stake Gnosis Beacon Chain — which was launched in December 2021.

Gnosis merge coordinator, dapplion, tweeted on June 7 that Gnosis will soon launch shadow forks to begin testing its own merge.