The final countdown (to The Ethereum Merge)
It's official.
Dress rehearsal is over - the final countdown to The Ethereum Merge has begun.
Between September 13-16, the Ethereum network will 'hard fork' and make the old way of doing things incompatible with the new.
We've talked a lot about what this update will do...
Ethereum users will be able to earn ~4-5% interest on their holdings through staking, the network's energy consumption will be reduced 99% and transaction speeds will go from a maximum of 30 per second, to 100,000 per second.
So let's briefly cover why it matters...
Staking
Investors' strategies will go from 'buy and hold ETH' to 'buy, hold and earn interest on ETH.' Seems small, but it's very attractive to those with deep pockets.
Lowered energy consumption
Many big companies have been hesitant to adopt Ethereum into their products and investment portfolios, because it doesn't meet green mandates. This will no longer be the case.
A lot more money could soon be coming to Ethereum
Transactions per second (TPS)
Whether a product or service has 10 users or 10M - if they want to integrate Ethereum payments/trading into their platforms, they can do so without worrying about network performance.
E.g. video games with millions of concurrent users can integrate smart contracts into their titles to let players collect NFTs and trade ETH in game (without the network choking up).
Sounds cool! What's next?
The one problem The Merge won't tackle is transaction costs (as of this writing, each transaction costs ~$14)
If the Ethereum development team can tackle that, ETH will be set up to become 'the operating system of Web3.'