Ethereum difficulty bomb delayed but network acceptance is still growing
The difficulty bomb is designed to reduce mining profitability to discourage miners before the long-awaited Merge.
Ethereum network developers have decided to delay the difficulty bomb, a major step toward a much-anticipated Merge upgrade for the layer-1 blockchain.
They set the delay to two months to “be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time”, said the core developer Tim Beiko in a June 11 tweet.
The difficulty bomb will be a measure to disincentivize ETH mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices running as the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS).
It dramatically increases the difficulty in verifying miners’ transactions in the network, thus reducing profitability for PoW miners. Eventually, it would become impossible for physical miners to confirm a block. The difficulty bomb is a feature of the network added to the code in 2016 because plans for the Merge to become the Consensus Layer (formerly known as ETH 2.0) was being formed.
According to some estimates transitioning to PoS should reduce the Ethereum network’s energy demands by up to 99.9%. Other PoS networks, such as Polygon and Fantom Opera, boast insignificant power demands compared to other PoW networks.
Although Beiko does not mention it, postponing the difficulty bomb could lead to further delays for the Merge itself, which is expected to take place in August 2022.
On 9th June, the Ropsten testnet on Ethereum completed its own successful merge to PoS, which was the “first dress rehearsal” for the real merge.
Despite the bearish sentiment going on in the crypto market, the Ethereum user base remains strong. Except for one day since December 2020, daily transactions on the network have remained above one million. Measuring daily transactions gives a simple and concise look at the general load that the network handles.
The number of unique addresses is still a steep increase every month. The number of new unique wallets has not decreased since the first increase in December 2017. Ethereum now has about 198 million unique wallets, an increase of 14.5 times since December 7, 2017.
According to CoinGecko, the price of ETH, along with other cryptocurrencies, has dropped 6.8% to $ 1,360 in the last 24 hours.
