Different players and parties in the cryptocurrency industry are strategising their upcoming movements as the Ethereum (ETH) network gets ready for the impending Merge, which will mark Ethereum’s shift to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) validation process.
The Merge is anticipated to take place on September 19, 2022. Ethereum is changing from a PoW network that depends on miners to validate transactions to one that depends on validators who “stake” Ethereum tokens in exchange for a chance to validate transactions (PoS).
Chainlink in particular announced on its website that it wishes to align with the Ethereum community’s social consensus to change Ethereum’s consensus mechanism to PoS, and refused to support any Proof-of-Work (PoW) forks after the Merge.
However, the Chainlink protocol and services will remain available during and after the Merge. To ensure minimal disruption, the smart contract oracle provider is conducting a thorough quality check.
Hongcai Gu, a Chinese developer, has assembled a team of 60 developers to remove the difficulty bomb, a part of the Ethereum code designed to push Ethereum miners away from the PoW consensus mechanism.
Some crypto community factions, who see the risk of eradicating miners and exposing Ethereum to greater security breaches, have even proposed a fork to preserve Ethereum’s current PoW consensus mechanism after the Merge. Chinese Miners like Chandler Guo have proposed a hard fork enabling miners to continue to support a newly separated PoW version of the network.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said to reporters in an exclusive event at ETHSeoul over the weekend stating that he does not expect forks to harm the Ethereum network.
Chainlink provides data feeds to smart contracts on programmable blockchains like Ethereum and Cardano, informing them of real world conditions. After the TerraUSD/LUNA ecosystem collapsed in early May, Chainlink suspended the LUNA price oracle, resulting in an exploit of the Venus protocol due to a LUNA pricing disparity.
Chainlink’s native token, LINK, underwent a severe selloff in May as institutional investors and whales sold the token, resulting in a 32% decline in price from the beginning of the month.
