After years of research and delay, the big redesign of Ethereum known as the Merge has finally taken place successfully. This has resulted in the digital machinery at the heart of the second-largest cryptocurrency being moved to a system that is far more energy-efficient.

Proof-of-Stake (POS) is a technique through which new ETH is created instead of by people and entities promising substantial sums of already existing ETH. This new ETH is then distributed to those persons and entities. It is projected that the transformation will be completed more quickly, with more scalability, and at a lower cost to the environment by more than 99%.

Ethereum founder and famous crypto public figure, Vitalik Buterin, said:

[It] has obviously been a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem since pretty much the beginning. We started the proof-of-stake research with that blog post on Slosher back in January 2014.

Buterin believes that The Merge is a fundamental rethinking of our understanding of physical rules. PoW is based on the use of features that are already available in the world, such as energy, hardware, and computers. On the other hand, everything is virtualized while using PoS, which essentially enables us to build a synthetic world that follows its own set of rules governing physics.

Over 41,000 people were watching an “Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party” on YouTube when the Merge began at 1:00 AM GMT-5. They waited anxiously for critical figures indicating that Ethereum’s core systems had survived. When the Merge was finally completed after about 15 minutes of waiting, it was deemed a success.