Ethereum Targeting October for The Merge through Scaling Project ‘Rayonism’

Ether is enjoying a lot of momentum with prices aiming for fresh ATH as interest for the cryptocurrency gains interest from retail and institutions alike, as seen in the volume recorded by CME ETH futures, inflows into Ether funds, and four ETH ETFs gaining traction.

This has been ahead of the London upgrade that will involve EIP-1559 aiming to burn the ETH paid in gas fees, making it a deflationary crypto asset, all ready to come in July, a tentative date set in the last dev meeting.

16/21 Together EIP1559 and PoS will make ETH a deflationary asset.https://t.co/aAFBluVwWi

— Yule (@yulesa) April 14, 2021

Besides this reduction in ETH supply, the transition of the second-largest network from PoW to PoS is of significant importance. It will help the network remove the scalability issue.

Phase 0, the beacon chain, has already been launched in December, and almost 4 million ETH has been deposited so far in ETH 2.0.

During the ongoing ETHGlobal's Scaling Ethereum event, a virtual hackathon that also involves summits, the devs talked about the need to move away from the centralized staking, especially crypto exchanges, and onto more decentralized options.

I warned for at least two years that CEXs will dominate staking unless decentralized alternatives are made very attractive. Alas, Binance Kraken and Huobi together have more than 30% of all Beacon Chain stake already. This is before Coinbase has joined the staking game. pic.twitter.com/jgNrjJAMoZ

— Hasu (@hasufl) April 25, 2021

The developers working on Ethereum are targeting October 2021 for the Merge, which will swap the actual consensus layer from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Though a bit optimistic, Ethereum virtual Hackathon hosting between April 16th and May 14th is working on the Merge. It has been given the name of Rayonism, a project that is taking the research and engineering efforts of the Eth1-Eth2 Merge and Sharding and building testnets around the ETHGlobal Scaling Hackathon.

If the Merge gets delayed due to the Shanghai upgrade, it can then come by Q1 of 2022.

During the Summit, it has been shared that the code changes for the Marge are expected to take weeks and not months, with much of the work needed to be done with testing and auditing.

Once the Merge is complete, a cleanup fork will take place, which will enable the withdrawal of the locked ETH.

From here, the team will move to sharding, which is expected to make the network scale up to 25x, which the community has long been waiting for as very high usage of the Ethereum network has made it accustomed to congestion and high fees.

Parallel to sharding, the key execution layer upgrade will be statelessness along with state expiry that will enable much higher gas limits and scaling on L1. Finally, the focus will be on zkSync 2.0 and StarkNet to make native execution on shards easier.

So, all the major upgrades to the Ethereum network are all planned out with developers working on making them a reality, and it is driving the ETH prices higher, which is currently trading above $2,500.