ETH Core Developers Delay Difficulty Bomb For Two Months

The ETH Core developers delay the difficulty bomb for two months which could mean a longer wait for The Merge as we can see more today in our latest Ethereum news.

The ETH core developers delay the Difficulty bomb after meeting on Friday and potentially delay the Merge which will migrate the network from a PoW consensus to a PoS. The difficulty bomb was planted in the ETH code in 2015 as a measure to force validators and accept the merge. The implementation of the merge dubbed went live on the Ropsten testnet a few weeks ago and after the testnet merge and the discussion of a number of bugs revealed by the test merge, the developers proposed EIP-5133 to delay the bomb to August 2022 and have been already delayed five times before. Lead Developer Tim Beiko added:

“In short, we agreed to the bomb delay. We are aiming for a ~2 month delay and for the upgrade to go live in late June.”

This was contentious, to say the least. Again, recommend watching the livestream for the back and forth. How much pressure is the right amount to put client teams under, the impact of block times on users, and of PoW on the environment all came up 😅

— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) June 10, 2022

While the Ethereum developers didn’t commit fully to date for the merge, both the ETH founder Vitalik Buterin and Preston Van Loon said that if everything goes to plan, August will be the chosen month:

“So, we will push back the Ethereum difficulty bomb. We say it won’t delay the Merge. I sincerely hope not.”

Ethereum as the largest smart contracts platform is migrating from a PoW consensus model to a PoS model which should make the blockchain more efficient and less energy consuming. Ethereum is supported by validators that use computers to solve math problems in order to record and verify transactions. After the Merge, the validators will stake coins to confirm transactions and there are more concerns that some validators could reject PoS. To prevent this scenario, the difficulty bomb will increase the block difficulty over time, and over the extended period will become impossible for them to mine new transactions because of the near infinite block difficulty which will force an end to the Pow on Ethereum.

On the other hand, the difficulty bomb executed at the wrong time will halt ETH before the Merge is even completed which will be a disaster. Ethereum is the number 2 by crypto marekt cap and it dropped over the past day by 19% due to a combination of macroeconomic factors. ETH is now down by 69% from its ATH of $4891.