Vitalik Buterin Reveals That The Ethereum Merge Test Is 90% Complete

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the blockchain project is in the midst of a long, but final review process that will strengthen the network in many ways.

Buterin confirmed that the developers of Ethereum are working on the final five steps aimed at improving the overall performance of the network. Importantly, The Merge is 90% complete, but needs to be tested in Ropsten first.

During the annual Ethereum conference, Buterin discussed improvements the development team is working on, both short-term and long-term.

With the protocol’s long-anticipated switch from PoW to PoS (The Merge) supposed to be coming later this year, Ethereum’s co-founder noted that most of the testing had been done.

In fact, The Merge has only been tested on Ropsten, which is likely “happening soon.”

The 9th Shadow Fork has been activated. This means that the start of The Merge’s final trial phase has arrived. One of the chief developers of Ethereum hinted that such work could happen in September of this year.

Buterin added that validators will be able to begin withdrawing the ETH they have locked in their deposit contracts once the network is merged.

“After the Merge you will be able to build an Ethereum client that does not even know the proof of work phase even happened,” Buterin explained.

There is still an Ethereum roadmap, called the Surge that focuses on increasing the scalability of the network. By the end of the roadmap, Ethereum will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second. 

However, according to the developers of the Ethereum network The Merge upgrade date to turn the network’s consensus mechanism into Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may initially be September 19, 2022.