The Altair upgrade, the first hard fork of the Ethereum beacon chain, is expected to take place on October 27. Previously, the Ethereum testnet Pyrmont completed the Altair hard fork on August 19. The few updates brought by the present Altair hard fork focus on two aspects. First of all, the update will introduce sync committees for light clients. Secondly, it improves the validator rewards and the rules of penalties, which will change the total rewards and increase the penalties for latencies on the part of validators.
Despite the fact that it only features a few updates, Altair still is the first hard fork of the beacon chain. The update shows that the beacon chain is progressing smoothly and that all the development processes are unfolding as scheduled. The introduction of the beacon chain, a major part of ETH 2.0, will be the first step in Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS.
At the same time, developers are also preparing for the merger of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0, which will be a combination of the current ETH main chain and the beacon chain. Although the Altair hard fork is not considered as part of the integration process, it will likely be the only hard fork upgrade before the merger. If the Altair hard fork were to suffer from setbacks (e.g. if a large number of “stakers” failed to upgrade their client promptly), then the merge will be postponed.
Source: Twitter
Earlier, Ethereum developer trent conducted tests for the conversion from PoW to PoS on Gethouse and Gethstar. Additionally, not long ago, Ben Edgington, a ConsenSys researcher and Eth2 developer, also updated the latest progress of the merger in the Eth2 content library. Mr. Edgington mentioned that more than 40 representatives from the research teams of Eth1 and Eth2, the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys Quilt R&D, and ConsenSys TX/RX participated in the Greece Workshop, where they stated the commitment to creating a development network with multiple clients and long-term operation. The Workshop also mentioned that the current developer testnet for the Eth1-Eth2 merge, which contains three Eth1 execution clients and four Eth 2 consensus clients, has shifted to PoS and is processing transactions with sound operation. This means that the Ethereum developer testnet focusing on the 1.0 and 2.0 merge has been activated and that no problem has occurred so far.
Meanwhile, on October 5, Tim Beiko, a core developer of Ethereum, has submitted the EIP-4345 proposal, aimed at delaying the Ethereum Difficulty bomb from December 2021 to May 2022. It is clear from this EIP document that the primary reason for the delay is that the Shanghai upgrade of Ethereum and/or the Eth1-Eth2 merge will be completed before May 2022 and that it makes more sense to activate the difficulty bomb by then. Based on the delay and its cause, we can tell that Ethereum developers are quite optimistic about the current progress of the Eth1-Eth2 merge.
Although Ethereum remains the most widely adopted public chain platform, for users, its congested network traffic incurs huge costs, which has motivated the rapid Layer 2 ecosystem development on Ethereum. According to data from L2BEAT, as of October 12, the Layer 2 TVL has reached $3.58 billion, including contributions from Arbitrum ($2.18 billion), dYdX ($780 million), and Optimism ($250 million).
Source: L2BEAT
Since the London upgrade on August 5, Ethereum has entered a stage of gas burning. As of October 13, over 500,000 gas tokens have been burned, according to ultrasound.money. From a long-term perspective, Ethereum’s gas prices remain above 100 gwei, which indicates that the network still suffer from expensive gas fees and heavy loads due to the massive user base.
Source: ultrasound.money
We can only expect alleviation of these problems after the Eth1-Eth2 merge. As Ethereum completes the upgrade to PoS, its TPS will be significantly improved. This, together with a thriving Layer 2 ecosystem, will minimize the user threshold and optimize the user experience. There are still around 6 months before the launch of the difficulty bomb in May 2022, and the Shanghai upgrade and the Eth1-Eth2 merge are likely to be completed during this period. For miners and users of the network, the strategy for mining and investment should be adjusted based on this timeline and the development progress of Ethereum.