Ethereum Gray Glacier Is Coming, Another Difficulty Bomb Delay

Ethereum's mainnet is scheduled to undergo yet another upgrade before the much-awaited ETH 2.0 transition, called Gray Glacier. At its core, Ethereum’s developers are going to delay the difficulty bomb once again, this time – by 100 days.

The difficulty bomb basically would render the traditional Ethereum chain unviable for Proof-of-work miners, thus – rendering it useless for transacting value. This is the last time Ethereum is seeing such an update, before the long-awaited Merge to the Beacon chain or the proof-of-stake (PoS) system.

According to Tim Beiko, Ethereum lead developer, the difficulty bomb would also stop scam forks or spin-offs from Ethereum, as the bomb would be hard if not impossible to remove without heavy technical skills.

“[…] this is one I think is probably way underrated – is the idea that it makes it a bit harder to create a scam fork of Ethereum. Two years or three years ago, there was, like, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Gold, all these forks of forks of forks. The reason in large part you don’t see those on Ethereum is because they require not only a one-line change – like a lot of these Bitcoin forks do – but they also require people to run the updated software,” Tim Beiko stated.

Gray Glacier incoming

Gray Glacier is scheduled to happen at block 15,050,000, with experts expecting it to occur on Wednesday, June 29. However, Ethereum’s testnet would not be affected, as the update is aimed at the mainnet only.

Meanwhile, other experts are considering the update to be just a trick for Ethereum developers to buy more time before the Merge, and the transition to Ethereum 2.0 could be still months away. Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, noted that the transition could happen as early as August. However, a more plausible scenario for the Ethereum 2.0 merge is before the end of the year.

Could Gray Glacier bring trouble for Ethereum?

Gray Glacier is nothing more than yet another delay in the difficulty adjustment, so the overall Ethereum holders could be safe about their holdings. Most of the work would be on the side of crypto exchanges, wallet companies, and miners.

Binance already announced that the exchange would support the Gray Glacier upgrade. Node operators, however, have to update their clients to the latest versions - Besu “22.4.3”; Erigon “2022.06.03-alpha”; go-ethereum (geth) “Camaron (v1.10.19)”; and Nethermind “v1.13.3”.

Ethereum flirts with the $1,000 mark

One week before the update, Ethereum is still trying to come back after the bearish havoc from the past two weeks. According to data from CryptoBrowser, Ethereum currently trades at $1,112.26 per ETH, with trading volumes indicating that a possible move above $1,200 in the near future.

Source: CryptoBrowser

Overall, the market is on a slight recovery, but it is still below $1 trillion in market capitalization.