Vitalik Buterin, who is known for co-creating Ethereum, has taken to Twitter to remind members of the Ethereum community that the beacon chain hard fork will take place on September 6, despite the fact that the merging will take place between September 10 and September 20.
Beacon Chain was released in late 2020 and has been operating independently of the current Ethereum Mainnet execution layer. Since that time, the Beacon Chain has been put through testing to ensure that it can attain consensus on its own state while the Mainnet validates transactions and adds new blocks to the blockchain.
The process that Ethereum refers to as “the Merge” has been compared to a starship doing a mid-flight engine swap in order to upgrade to a newer, more powerful model in preparation for an interplanetary journey. After the upgrade on September 6th, the Beacon Chain and the Mainnet are going to merge into one single network between the 10th and 20th of September, with the Beacon Chain taking over as the primary generator of new blocks.
The Merge is anticipated to cut energy usage in the cryptocurrency market by around 99%, making it more suited for decentralization. The imminent introduction of the Ethereum merge has contributed to a rise in the price of ETH, which has helped the largest altcoin to recover from the severe drop it had during the crypto winter season.
According to data provided by markets aggregator CoinMarketCap, the price of Ethereum was trading at $1,585 at the time this article was being written. This represents a gain of nearly 10% in the previous 24 hours and a drop of 2.3% in the previous week.
