Ethereum: The Merge Breakdown - Figment

Ethereum: The Merge Breakdown

Published: September 15, 2022

Did we make it?

We sure did!

What exactly happened?

Total Terminal Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000 was reached around 6.44 UTC on Sep 15, 2022.

This event signifies the beginning of the Paris Hard Fork. The duty of processing transactions and coming to consensus (among other things) has been passed from miners to validators. Blocks on the Beacon Chain now contain execution payloads and validators are now responsible for building the canonical chain. For more about the Paris upgrade see here.

On September 6th the Bellatrix Hard Fork prepared the Beacon Chain to take on these responsibilities (see here for more).

From a high level, pre-merge both transaction processing and consensus were all accomplished within Eth1 nodes. Post-merge these responsibilities have been split out – with transaction execution responsibilities retained by the execution layer and consensus moved to the consensus layer.

Rewards?

One of the things stakers will be most interested to watch are post-merge rewards. Estimates have varied from a 50% increase to more than doubling.

That is average validator daily income of 0.003845 ETH and network-wide issuance to validators of around 1600 ETH/day. Looking at rewards paid out to miners pre-merge and rewards paid to validators post-merge gives a sense of the drop in Ether issuance.

Conclusion

All told a very smooth merge that went according to plan and ushers in a new era for Ethereum. The community will now likely turn its attention to post-merge rewards and the next upgrade – Shanghai. We’ll monitor rewards in the coming days as well as Shanghai developments and provide more perspective soon. Happy Merge!

To learn more about staking Ethereum with Figment, click here.