The Gray Glacier hardfork went live on Ethereum on Thursday. The said upgrade introduced changes to the network difficulty bomb parameters by pushing it back 700,000 blocks. The same roughly translates into 100 days, giving developers until mid-October to begin the current mainnet merge.
According to Etherscan, the Gray Glacier hard fork took place Thursday at block number 15050000 around 6:54 a.m. ET. Before that, the Arrow Glacier slowdown happened last December and pushed the bomb until the middle of this year.
Difficulty bombs actually increase the difficulty of puzzles in the Ethereum mining algorithm. As such, it is designed to promote the network’s transition to 2.0 by discouraging miners.
Since the hard fork has already been completed, node operators and miners will have to start using the latest version of their Ethereum clients. If they are not updated, the clients will remain in sync with the pre-fork blockchain. In fact, they would not be able to send transactions or operate on the post-upgrade Ethereum network.
According to Tim Beiko of Ethereum Foundation and client developer Nethermind, the upgrade went smoothly and no glitch was noticed.
Ethereum’s Sepolia next in line
Before the current mainnet merger, Ethereum would undergo three public testnet mergers. With the Ropsten already here, Sepolia is next in line. Over the next few days, the testnet would undergo a shine test, simulating what would happen during the actual merging of the Beacon Chain and the mainnet.
According to the foundation’s announcement post,
†The network will transition to proof-of-stake when the total difficulty in the proof-of-work chain will exceed 17,000,000,000,000,000, which is expected to happen in the coming days.†
After Sepolia, only Goerli/Prater needs to be merged before it actually goes to the mainnet. The exact date of The Merge has not been determined, although rough estimates point to the end of Q3 or the beginning of Q4. The foundation clarifies,
“…the date for the Ethereum mainnet proof-of-stake transition has not been set. Any source claiming otherwise is likely a scam.”