Sepolia could merge with the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain as early as Wednesday, July 6, according to developers' estimates.
Ethereum has now completed the first stage of merging its Sepolia testnet with the Beacon Chain.
It is expected that in the coming days the network in the proof of work (PoW) overcome the total difficulty set by the developers to complete the merge of this second testnet.
Although this event could arrive in the next 72 hours, Estimates point to next Wednesday, July 6, as a probable date.
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Sepolia will be the second Ethereum testnet to merge with the new blockchain being built on Proof of Stake (PoS), before the expected mainnet merge.
Ethereum initiates Sepolia merge
Ethereum Foundation developers reported last week that the Sepolia testnet was transitioning to the Beacon Chain.
The first stage of the testnet merge process with Beacon Chain was completed at the end of June, according to the publication carried out on the foundation's blog. This stage consisted of launching a network version on the Ethereum consensus layer, also called Ethereum 2.0.
The total network difficulty on the proof-of-work chain is now expected to exceed 17.000.000.000.000.000 petahash (Approach), in the coming days, for Sepolia to fully merge with the new network in proof-of-stake (PoS).
Following the merger of Sepolia with the Beacon Chain, the testnet will have a set of authorized validators, the developers explained.
In addition to this, they announced that the final testnet implementation on the Ethereum consensus layer will be the Goerli and Prater testnets, which will be merged into the Beacon Chain before the final The Merge event. Prater is a PoS-based Ethereum testnet designed to setup and validate nodes.
The rest of the Ethereum testnets on the execution layer, such as Kiln and Rinkeby, will not merge with the Beacon Chain and will shut down after completing the mainnet merge. Even Ropsten, the first Ethereum testnet to complete the merge with Ethereum 2.0 will be closed after the merger due to the difficulty of running and maintaining active nodes on this network.
In the final race towards Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum developers have been trying to bring Ethereum to the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism for years, as developer Tim Beiko indicated on his Twitter account.
However, after several major updates, such as London and several shadow forks (shadow fork), the blockchain is ready for testnet deployments at the consensus layer.
The deployment of Ethereum testnets on the Beacon Chain means the Final stage of testing for the long-awaited Ethereum migration a PoS.
At the end of June, Ethereum also successfully launched the Gray Glacier Update, which delayed the difficulty bomb for Ethereum PoW mining, approximately 700.000 blocks or 100 days; the time in which developers hope to complete the network merger.
The Ethereum difficulty bomb is designed to progressively disincentivize block mining by increasing the time and difficulty of mining a block within the network.
From an economic point of view, this will not be profitable for miners, so they will have to abandon the proof-of-work network and adapt to the new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
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