SSV Network has come up with an 8 weeks program leading up to the Ethereum merge timeline, to help you be prepared for the changes it delivers to you as a network user.

I am Chinmay, and I have decided to go through this series of discussions by the ssv network, held as twitter spaces, and write down key insights from these talks as my takeaways of what I learnt in the process.

This article is supposed to be a recap of the first episode, available here. I will be following up with more blogposts from here on, summarizing things up for non-geeky people alike.

What exactly is Ethereum Merge ?

The Ethereum network is moving from Proof of Work consensus to Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus. The core team was looking to explore PoS since the Eth 1.0 launch, and when they finally had the design in 2019-20, it was risky to switch it overnight, because of the billions of dollars involved.

To solve this risk, a separate chain was launched back then, with PoS consensus, called the Beacon chain, wherein people need to deposit ETH to become a validator, but without any end-user transaction. And execution chain (ETH 1.0) was parallelly run with user account balances and smart contracts, live on chain.

When the core team had battle-tested the Beacon chain, and was finally sure that it works, we were ready to use it as the main consensus engine of Ethereum.

The merge is simply an event of combining these two chains together, set to happen around August 2022, and is called ETH 2.0 post-merge.

The Development of ETH 2.0 

The Ethereum teams have followed the use of independent teams working on the two chains, parallelly. This might have helped them in shipping faster, part by part.

Let’s look at the broader timeline of the project :

1. May 2021, researchers and developers started looking for solutions to integrate the two chains.
2. After a few months of nail-and-tooth grinding, a prototype of the architecture emerged from a hackathon. Lots of bugs were discovered and solved over the next weeks.
3. A Testnet was launched to stress test parts of the network a bit more and make sure tooling and applications work. 
4. Regular and repeated testing was the most important part of the confirmation that PoS algorithm and the merge was satisfactory.

A major challenge was to make sure that different clients worked properly upon merging the two chains. Since different clients (like Geth, Lighthouse etc.)  could be used for both the chains at the user hardware, this required testing all possible coupled combinations of Ethereum clients – around 20 of them. For example, the Lighthouse Consensus client may not work with Geth Execution client, causing issues.

Today most client combinations work smoothly. Nevertheless, the Ethereum Mainnet needs only 67 % validators to work well at a moment, so even if some client encounters unspecified errors, the network would not suffer post-merge of the Mainnet.

You may ask why are these many clients required in the first place ? Lets examine that.

Importance of Diverse Client Ecosystem for Ethereum

1. Too much dependency on a single client may damage the protocol in unprecedented ways, any bug in it becomes a part of the network spec. On the flip side, having many clients gives decentralized exchanges an option to check if different clients are in agreement over the block order, because if they are not, that means there is an issue in the chain.
2. Having different clients helps in getting different teams get into the ecosystem which enhances the overall community as well as grants freedom to build client with features of one’s liking.

Misconceptions around Ethereum Merge

This is the most important concern in the community. The degree to which this needs to be addressed comes from the fact that they are being propagated by crypto bros all over twitter and everyone is susceptible to them. 

These are the most popular ones :

1. This merge will lower the gas fees of the Ethereum Layer 1 network. You can read more about the technicalities of why this is not true. The block onboarding time on the chain will reduce from 13 seconds to 12 s, which will improve overall chain efficiency, but not gas fees.
2. Post-merge, all the ETH staked on the beacon chain will be unblocked and available for withdrawal. This is not true. The core team estimates that it will take around 6 months to 1 year after merge to allow withdrawals from the system, and it will happen bit by bit.
3. Users will Require 32 ETH to run a validator node. This is also false.

Conclusion

There is going to be a wave of new users in the web3 ecosystem. Lets see how ssv network helps in the process.

SSV Network is an open source protocol with scalable distributed validator technology. It provides decentralized staking infrastructure for validator key sharing. One use case of it can be seen in the fact that it allows distributed validator node operation and control. For example, if one of the 4 operators defaults or is under maintenance or offline, the other 3 partners will continue to serve the purpose – thus improving performance and reducing faults.

SSV also has the complete ecosystem with its own governance token, product and community. Pay them a visit – SSV Network

Embrace yourself for the merge and the next wave of more such tools and applications.

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