Last month, Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, went through a historic change. As the network’s Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) reached 58,750,000,000T, Ethereum officially implemented its mainnet merge. Meanwhile, its consensus mechanism, which functions as the law of Ethereum, shifted from PoW to PoS, signifying the transition from the mining era to the staking era. This also conforms to Vitalik Buterin’s original vision when he founded the network: turning Ethereum into an energy-efficient PoS network.
As we all know, PoW has always been criticized for its heavy energy consumption needed to meet the demand of its increasing hashing power, as well as the environmental damages that follow. According to analysts of the Ethereum Foundation, the shift to PoS will reduce energy consumption by 99.95%. In addition, compared to PoW, PoS offers the following advantages:
1) PoS enables enhanced security at the same cost;
2) With PoS, it is easier for the network to recover from attacks;
3) Compared with ASIC mining, PoS means higher levels of decentralization.
In light of these advantages, at the 2022 Mainnet Conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin strongly urged blockchains like Dogecoin and Zcash that wish to improve their scalability to follow suit and shift to PoS.
That said, based on the fundamental considerations, which project is most likely to follow suit and transition to PoS?
Will Zcash transition to PoS?
Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox didn’t believe Ethereum’s shift to PoS would work out. In fact, he thought that “it’ll never work.” However, at the Mainnet Conference, Zooko highly praised Ethereum’s developer team and said: “And then you and the Ethereum [developers] proved me wrong. It totally worked.”As an iconic privacy coin, Zcash, like other long-standing cryptos such as BTC and LTC, also relies on miners to maintain the normal running of the network. More specifically, on such blockchains, miners compete with each other for block rewards and add transactions to blocks, which allows the network to keep running. However, the Zcash team has also noticed the advantages that PoS could bring. According to the three-year roadmap released by its development organization Electric Coin Company (ECC), Zcash plans to shift from PoW to the more eco-friendly PoS mechanism by 2025.
We expect the shift to minimize Zcash’s carbon footprint. In addition, as it will no longer have to pay for the expensive mining costs such as electricity, the shift will reduce the selling pressure facing Zcash. Also, long-term staking means that there will be much fewer speculative bubbles, which will help the network build a stronger ecosystem and create greater potential for ZEC.
Despite that, with respect to the specific Merge-like plan, Zcash said that they are still evaluating the post-merge performance of Ethereum. As such, there are still many uncertainties as to whether Zcash will switch to PoS, and we hope the team could reach a consensus soon.
Will Dogecoin transition to PoS?
As an advisor to the Dogecoin Foundation, Vitalik Buterin and his constructive remarks are important advice for the future development of Dogecoin. In late 2021, long before the Merge, Dogecoin updated its roadmap and added the proposal for Community Staking, possibly because Buterin had advised Dogecoin to switch to PoS in private.
Source: https://foundation.dogecoin.com/trailmap/prologue/We all know that the insane popularity of Dogecoin had to do with one public figure: Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla. In 2021, repeatedly endorsed by Musk, Dogecoin gained worldwide attention and captured the spotlight both in and outside the crypto space. As the adoption rate of Dogecoin grows, its flaws under the PoW mechanism have become increasingly obvious. Meanwhile, Tesla has suspended product purchases using Bitcoin due to the environmental concerns caused by the high energy consumption of crypto mining, which also encouraged Dogecoin to look for alternative consensus mechanisms.
The success of the Merge, as well as Buterin’s advice, naturally reaffirmed Dogecoin’s decision to transition to PoS. Of course, the specific date of the PoS update has yet to be determined. According to some sources, Dogecoin will announce the update and release the roadmap for its PoS plan at some point this year.