Ethereum May Transition To PoS Sooner Amid Miners Outrage

The Ethereum development community seems to be working on speeding up the transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. The preparations work has put Ethereum miners into a state of rebellion, as their rewards for transaction validation would stop existing in their current form.

Ethereum developer “Mikhail Kalinin” published the specifications for Eth 2.0’s future chain merge, which would combine the existing Ethereum network with the new blockchain.

The news comes amid growing tension among Ethereum’s community. Also, the much-anticipated EIP-1559 is expected to cut down miners revenue by half. Miners prepared for a “show of force attack”, suggesting other miners switch their hash power to the 1559-opposed mining pool Ethermine for 51 hours on April 1.

However, developers are seemingly aware of the situation, as Vitalik Buterin himself commented that if miners are opting in for a “51% attack”, the migration to ETH 2.0 would happen as soon as possible. Also, the developers rolled back the scheduled July London update, only to make the odds for a hard fork less likely to happen.

Buterin also noted that core Ethereum developers are prioritizing the chain merge over sharding implementation.

“That can even be what we bring to mainnet,” Buterin noted, adding that “the code might forego a handful of features, including say, validator withdrawals.”

The battle for the high ground between developers and miners could result in faster second-layer scaling solutions to be pushed in the following months. According to Buterin, if Optimism could scale transaction throughput by 100, the layer-two solutions would give Ethereum some breathing room until sharding is implemented.

Apart from scaling, DeFi would also benefit from Ethereum improvements, as the world of decentralized finance turned into a multi-billion industry in just a few months. However, the popularity of DeFi protocols has completely changed the market, as the vast majority of applications are built on Ethereum’s blockchain, which skyrocketed the transaction fees and slowed down the network.

Meanwhile, another new Ethereum-based trend is setting in 2021 – non-fungible tokens (NFT). The purpose of the tokens is to act as a representation of virtual trading cards, collectibles, and works of art. NFTs are already generating a buzz, after a work of art by digital artist Beeple was sold for $70 million via the use of NFTs.