This may sound like a provocative statement, but it is a fact, fall in line else you won’t have a place in the #ethereum 2.0 ecosystem.
Ethereum is considered the most relevant alternate to #bitcoin. Interestingly bitcoin was designed to support a digital currency and a P2P blockchain network, whereas Ethereum was designed to be a platform and it has been adopted as one. By virtue of that distinction, its impact on the wider web3/decentralised ecosystem is expected to be big.
Ethereum “merge” was a major change to the “Layer 1” blockchain, that moved from a “proof of work(PoW)” consensus mechanism to a “proof of stake(PoS)” method. The merger will be completed on 15th September 2022, and will be in a transition phase for a few years.
Users will have to stake tokens to verify a transaction now in exchange for a fee, very different from PoW where users solved a puzzle to get tokens issued. This was the mining process, which resulted in huge energy usage, and limited scalability of Ethereum blockchain.
What will be the impact you ask, well depends on who you ask. Few that stand out are ;
* Energy usage was the biggest issue the merger attempted to solve. This will obviously impact the ETH miners, but it will also create a fork/split with a parallel PoW chain, and most likely make the PoS stacked coins unusable on the forked chain.
* Even though the #eth price seems to be stable, there was a possibility of a speculative shift, with unpredictable users behaviour.
* Big impact on the wider decentralized ecosystem, which is based on Ethereum, like the multiple “layer 2” tokens/ #stablecoins which do not have their own blockchain and are based on Ethereum. It is believed that more than 28% of Ethereum’s market cap is locked in stablecoins (#tether , USDT), these stablecoins are expected to have an impact.
\*Decentralised applications and a wider web3 ecosystem(Metaverse, NFT etc.) based on #ethereum is expected to see major shifts in the way they operate.
The long term impact is “expected” to be positive though, a scalable, secure, greener, faster “computer of the decentralised world” (at least relatively decentralised).
So will Bitcoin follow with a different consensus mechanism ? Maybe…