Ethereum has completed the arrow-shaped glacier upgrade! Delay the difficulty bomb until June next year

According to data from Ethernodes, the Ethereum network has completed the Arrow Glacier upgrade at a block height of 13,773,000 at 3:55 am Beijing time today. This upgrade includes the EIP-4345 proposal, which will postpone the Ethereum difficulty bomb until 2022. June.

According to Ethernodes data, as of the deadline, 1896 Ethereum nodes (73%) have completed the upgrade of the Arrow Glacier, and the remaining 702 nodes (27%) have not yet completed the upgrade. Among them, 83% of Geth client nodes, 85% of erigon client nodes and 48% of nethermind client nodes have been upgraded.

After the upgrade was completed, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko said on Twitter: Everything looks good, some loose nodes have not been updated, but there are no major problems. Hope this is the last time we postpone the difficulty bomb!

After the arrow-shaped glacier upgrade is completed, it means that the difficulty bomb has been postponed for the fifth time. Looking back at history, the first 4 delays occurred in the Byzantine upgrade (EIP-649), the Constantinople upgrade (EIP-1234), the Muir Glacier upgrade (EIP-2384), and the London upgrade (EIP-649) that ended in August this year. -3554).

Difficulty bomb postponed to June next year

Difficulty Bomb (Difficulty Bomb) is a mechanism that freezes mining when the Ethereum network transitions from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). It aims to increase the difficulty of generating blocks. , In order to extend the block time, the ultimate goal is to reduce the profit of POW mining.

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko told CNBC that the difficulty bomb is intended to slow or freeze mining activities on Ethereum. After the upgrade is completed, the difficulty bomb will be postponed to June 2022. At that time, the developers expect Ethereum has moved from PoW to PoS.

Tim Beiko said: After the transition is completed, the difficulty bomb will no longer exist in the Ethereum network.

Once successfully moving towards PoS, Ethereum will be more scalable, secure and sustainable. Tim Beiko said that the energy demand of the PoS mechanism will not be as much as the POW, and the impact of Ethereum on the environment will be reduced by 99%.

According to the announcement of the Ethereum Foundation last month, the reason for the delay of the difficulty bomb is as follows: the difficulty bomb only affects the PoW network, so it only exists on the Ethernet main network and the Ropsten test network. With the recent progress in the transition to PoS, it was decided to only postpone the detonation of difficulty bombs on the mainnet for the time being, and try to make a PoS transition on the Ropsten test network before the difficulty bombs are detonated.

Ethereum moves towards PoS

According to previous reports, Ethereum 2.0 and 1.0 are expected to merge in the second quarter of next year, which means that Ethereum will officially transition from PoW to PoS by then. The Ecological Construction Coordinator of the Ethereum Foundation, Trenton VanEpps, stated on the 17th that Ethereum will end the PoW consensus mechanism within 3 to 6 months, calling on Ethereum miners to be prepared for this.

Tim Beiko wrote an article on the official website of the Ethereum Foundation on November 29, detailing the impact of the merger on the application layer of Ethereum, and pointed out that if a reorganization attack is to be carried out after the merger, it is necessary to destroy 1/3 of the total pledged Ether, which is equivalent to More than 10 billion U.S. dollars.

As the zeroth phase (Phase0) of Ethereum 2.0, the Beacon Chain (Beacon Chain) was launched on December 1, 2020. The Beacon Chain shoulders the responsibility of transitioning from PoW to PoS and becomes the new backbone of Ethereum. The goal is Eventually, the network expansion speed will reach 100,000TPS.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on Twitter on the 2nd to celebrate the birthday of the beacon chain, and released an updated version of the Ethereum roadmap, showing the development of the Ethereum protocol and the sequence of future development. It can be seen from the roadmap that the merger (TheMerge) will be the next important milestone for Ethereum.