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The update, long awaited by the crypto community, went through early this Thursday morning, without a hitch. The Ethereum blockchain continues to work well, now through a proof-of-stake mechanism to verify transactions, rather than proof-of-work. A development that will allow the network to consume significantly less energy.
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– Ether, Ethereum’s native token, is the second most important cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.
The Ethereum blockchain, the most important in the cryptocurrency world after Bitcoin, successfully completed a technical transformation early this Thursday morning that should make it more efficient and less energy-intensive, according to the main players in the operation. “And we finished it! (…) Everyone who contributed to the success of The Merge (“fusion”, the technical name of the mutation, editor’s note) can feel very proud today,” tweeted Vitalik Buterin, co-founder and leading figure of this blockchain.
The “merger” consists of changing the way transactions are verified on the blockchain, a vast computer ledger known to be tamper-resistant, from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake mechanism. This operation will allow Ethereum to use drastically less electricity to operate, while the Bitcoin blockchain continues to use proof-of-work, which requires all machines on the Bitcoin network to run at full speed to verify transactions.
Ether, a cryptocurrency directly linked to Ethereum, accounts for approximately 20% of the total value of virtual currencies in existence, second only to Bitcoin (40%). But Ethereum has a much wider field of applications than its competitor, as it serves as a support for multiple uses, such as NFT exchanges.
In the context of rapid growth, Ethereum decided to move to a system that consumes less energy. A risky operation that some compare to replacing a diesel engine with an electric motor on a moving vehicle.
Following this “change” on Thursday, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, announced on Twitter that it was resuming trading on Ether. Binance suspended these exchanges as a precaution before the operation, as did most other cryptocurrency exchanges.
So far, “everything has gone exactly according to plan,” Simon Polrot, a blockchain specialist and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Digital Assets (ADAN), told AFP.
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