Ethereum's First Step To Maturity

Yesterday, Ethereum finished the long-awaited energy-saving merge upgrade. This switch of the underlying consensus model to proof-of-stake (PoS), comes after seven years of planning by the blockchain’s core developers.

Why does this matter? First, the Ethereum Foundation estimates that the merge to PoS dramatically reduces the blockchain’s power consumption by 99.95%. This shows real action from one of the largest chains to reduce its energy usage to 1/1000th of its former consumption. Second, enabling PoS will drop new supply issuance of ETH by 90%. This means that the number of ether mined per day will reduce from 13,000 to about 1,600 per day. Read more at Blockworks.

As reported by Bloomberg, during an online Merge viewing party, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin said, “This is the first step in Ethereum’s big journey toward being a very mature system. And there’s steps left to go. We still have to scale, we have to fix privacy. To me the Merge symbolizes the difference between an early stage Ethereum and the Ethereum we’ve always wanted.”