The Ethereum merge remains one of the most anticipated events in the crypto space. The upgrade was scheduled to take place on September 15, 2022. It was a long-awaited blockchain transition as it moved from PoW to PoS. The change will merge the Beacon Chain and the Ethereum mainnet into a single blockchain.
As an industry event, there have been several reactions and discussions regarding the merger. The Ethereum community is very hopeful for the success of the transition. For its part, the Ethereum development team has completed all the necessary checks and steps that will eventually activate the merge.
After recent merger preparation and anticipation activities, reactions are intensifying. One of the world’s leading crypto exchanges, Coinbase, has made a shocking revelation.
Coinbase Cloud had identified four possible risks in the Ethereum merge. The risks are operational, technical, lack of customer diversity and economic.
Possible risks of the Ethereum merger
Based on the highlighted points, Coinbase also offered some details on the risks.
Operational Risks: Recall that during the Bellatrix the participation of node operators and validators decreased. Some of the operators have not completed the upgrade for their customers. Also, there is some behind-the-scenes activity like testnets, client releases, last minute releases, and others.
According to a recent developer report, only 85% of nodes have completed the required and latest client releases. Additionally, there are records of around 25% to 30% of reviewers failing to complete the Sepolia upgrade. You have been taken offline due to problems as per the configuration.
Technical risk: The merger involves the merger of two different blockchains, the Ethereum mainnet and the Beacon Chain. While the first is based on PoW, the second is based on PoS. This makes the merge one of the most technically complex upgrades in the crypto space. Hence, it is very prone to bug attacks and other technical problems.
An instance of the errors was encountered when upgrading the Nethermind and Go Ethereum (geth) execution layer clients. However, the development team has provided a practical solution and possible guidelines to avoid a recurrence.
Risk of a lack of customer diversity: Once a customer lacks diversity, it could increase the risk of a consensus customer dominating among others. Such a client can violate the consensus or even use their terms to suggest blocks.
Economic risk: With the merge, miners will become irrelevant on the Ethereum blockchain as validators will take over block production. The type of GPUs used to mine Ether is also different from BTC. So you can even switch to bitcoin mining. Your alternatives are on all available mineable coins.
Bitcoin falls on the l BTCUSDT chart on Tradingview.com
In addition, the Ethereum PoW fork can cause significant problems with protocols and dApps on the blockchain.
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