The Merge is officially tested on the Ropsten testnet

As previously reported, Ethereum decided to test The Merge upgrade on the Ropsten testnet in early June despite previous technical glitches.

According to the announcement of Tim Beiko, one of the main developers of Ethereum, the world’s 2nd largest cryptocurrency network will test the upgrade of The Merge on its main testnet Ropsten on June 8.

This news confirms previous rumors that the Ethereum team will bring The Merge to Ropsten in early June, ensuring the upgrade works on this testnet before rolling it to the Ethereum mainnet in early August if no further problems arise.

As explained, The Merge is the name referring to the event of “unifying” two blockchains Ethereum 1.0 (using Proof-of-Work to mine coins) and Ethereum 2.0 (using Proof-of-Stake and staking ETH) to generate new coins).

This can be seen as the most important milestone in Ethereum’s 7-year history and a hinge for the project to deploy more solutions to scale the network based on Proof-of-Stake, and at the same time minimize the impact on the environment by eliminating mining.

The Merge was originally slated to appear around June 2022. However, due to various delays, the ETH development team admitted that it was not able to meet that time target.

However, with the upgrade to testnet on Ropsten testnet as well as the announcement of “closing the calendar for August” by many high-ranking figures, including founder Vitalik Buterin, it can be said that The Merge will be available on Ethereum this August, but emphasize “if there are no further problems”.

Because of the complexity of the upgrade, it is difficult to say that everything will go smoothly. Just last week, the two parts that needed to be merged, the Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 chains, crashed. Specifically, Ethereum 1.0’s Ropsten testnet noted a problem in activating the TTD mechanism required for The Merge, while Ethereum 2.0’s Beacon Chain was reorged up to 7 blocks.

Despite this, the Ethereum developers were quick to identify and fix the problem, claiming that these were all low-probability cases.

ETH‘s price on the morning of May 31 has recovered by 10% after a month of continuous decline and set a “sad record” of 8 consecutive weeks of red week candles.