The Merge has successfully been implemented into Ethereum’s third and final testnet, Goerli, after previously adding Merge support to the testnets Sepolia and Ropsten. The Merge was added to Goerli at approximately 9:45 p.m. (EST) on Wednesday, transitioning to a full proof-of-stake (PoS) network.

Goerli’s Merge Transition Is Complete, Vitalik’s Father Dmitry Buterin Says Ethereum Will ‘Reduce Energy Consumption by -200x’

The Merge is getting closer by the day, and it’s expected to take place during the week of September 19, according to a pencilled-in date recently revealed by Ethereum developers. The new PoS system was added to the first two major Ethereum testnets Ropsten and Sepolia, and the latest implementation took place on the Goerli testing network. The upgrade happened when the network’s Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) surpassed 10,790,000.

The Goerli testnet has been successfully merged and is now a full Proof of Stake chain.

Next up is (finally) the Ethereum mainnet!!

The Merge is coming 🐼

— sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 (@sassal0x) August 11, 2022

The news follows the controversy surrounding The Merge as a few crypto community members plan to fork the chain and create a new proof-of-work (PoW) version of Ethereum. Vitalik Buterin recently denounced the PoW fork concept and the stablecoin issuer Tether announced full intentions to support the PoS version of ETH following The Merge.

“Tether believes that in order to avoid any disruption to the community, especially when using our tokens in [decentralized finance] projects and platforms, it’s important that the transition to PoS is not weaponized to cause confusion and harm within the ecosystem,” the company’s blog post noted August 9. “For this reason, Tether will closely follow the progress and preparations for this event and will support PoS Ethereum in line with the official schedule,” Tether added.

Furthermore, Pseudotheos, a researcher from the venture capital company Variant, has stated that the ETHW or Ethereum PoW fork idea is a retail trap. “The fact that people think an ETH PoW fork will be anything more than a retail trap means we haven’t learned anything from nearly a decade of social consensus hard forks,” Pseudotheos tweeted. “Nearly every smart contract on the POW fork will be broken in some capacity.”

Prior to The Merge being implemented on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet, Vitalik Buterin’s father Dmitry Buterin published a post on Facebook talking about the transition, while sharing an image of him playing chess with his son. ”You are watching Michael Saylor’s Youtube videos talking about 10 commandments. Ethereum teams are getting ready for the Goerli testnet merge today, [the] last one before the Merge that will reduce Ethereum energy consumption by -200x. We are not the same,” Dmitry wrote.

Meanwhile, the price of ethereum (ETH) has risen 4.1% during the last 24 hours and at the time of writing, a single ether is exchanging for $1,914.80 per unit. Ethereum has increased 74.5% during the last 30 days against the U.S. dollar. Statistics taken at 2:31 a.m. Thursday morning (EST) indicate Ethereum’s hashrate is still above the 1 petahash per second (PH/s) range, or approximately 1,003,402,659,273,349 hashes per second (H/s).

What do you think about The Merge being successfully merged into the testnet Goerli? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Editorial photo credit: Dmitry Buterin/ Facebook post