By
Godfrey Benjamin
May 13th, 2024
The Ropstem Merge upgrade shall be a critical step to check whether the client software on the Ethereum nodes perform normally and without any bugs.
Within the next 24-48 hours, Ethereum core developers are likely to launch the much-awaited upgrade ‘The Merge’ on the Ethereum Ropsten testnet. As part of the launch, Ropsten’s proof-of-work chain will merge with its beacon chain.
Last week, the official blog post from Ethereum noted that the tentative upgrade will happen on June 9. The Merge is a major milestone in the transition to the Proof-of-stake Ethereum 2.0. It will drastically improve the efficiency and scalability of the Ethereum blockchain.
The successful launch of ‘The Merge’ on the Ropsten testnet will give a major confidence boost to Ethereum developers. Later, they will proceed to upgrade the same on the Ethereum mainnet. The Ethereum blog post explains:
“After the Ropsten transition, two more testnets (Goerli and Sepolia) will be transitioned to proof-of-stake before focus shifts to mainnet. Other testnets, such as Rinkeby and Kovan, may be maintained and upgraded separately by the community but will no longer be monitored by client developers”.
As said, the upgrade tomorrow will merge the code of Ropsten’s two chains – the existing Proof-of-Work (PoW) and the other one being the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) beacon chain. The same process implementation will happen on the Ethereum mainnet tentatively by August 2022.
Details of the Ethereum Ropsten Merge
There have been multiple delays to the arrival of the Ethereum 2.0 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain. The Ethereum community has been eagerly waiting for long for the transition. Thus, a lot is at stake for Ethereum developers with ‘The Merge’ upgrade on Ropsten.
With Ropsten, the developers will test whether the client software behind running the Ethereum node is functioning normally and without any major bugs. Some of the major client software teams participating in the Ropsten merge include Lodestar, Lighthouse, Prysm, Besu, Nimbus, Erigon, Teku, Nethermond, and go-Ethereum.
The Merge will happen after the PoW Ropsten crosses a pre-defined metric dubbed total terminal difficulty (TDD). This is also to ensure that the upgrade won’t trigger before the Ropsten Beacon Chain gets ready. The Ethereum blog post notes:
“Node operators & stakers need to manually update this TDD value on both their execution and consensus layer clients prior to the network reaching this total difficulty. The current network total difficulty is part of the block header and can be obtained by querying your node or visiting a block explorer.”
More Ethereum news can be found here.