What is ETH2.0 Merger

When Ethereum went live in 2015, its goal was to secure the network through Proof of Stake (PoS), not Bitcoin’s Proof of Work (PoW). But PoS is a brand new concept. When Ethereum goes online, it has to adopt PoW first. Once they confirm that the time is ripe, they will transition to PoS.

To ensure that the PoS chain works smoothly before being released to the public, they released it as a separate beacon chain. “Merge” means that the beacon chain merges with the current PoW chain to complete the transition to PoS. The community plans to do this without network downtime, and all Ethereum testnets have transitioned successfully so far.

Uninterrupted transactions on the day of changing the consensus protocol has been described as changing an engine on the fly. The crypto world has never had a similar experience.

This is a major technical challenge, and I’ll write about some of the risks later.