Ethereum Nears Major Update With Testnet Set To Merge In June

Ethereum nears major update with the testnet set to merge in June and the Foundation also doubled reward payouts for the bounty program so let’s read more today in our latest Ethereum news.

The Ethereum developers reached another milestone on their way to the ETH 2.0 network upgrade and the Ropsten public testnet will undergo an upgrade to the PoS consensus on June 8. The configuration code for upgrading the testnet appeared in a pull request from the ETH DevOps engineer Parathi Jayanathy during the ETH client’s Git Hub repository. A month ago, the developers working on the Merge, started testing how the switch will work on the shadow fork. Two days later, the things seemed less rosy as the ETH foundation developer Tim Beiko noted the upgrade pushed to the latter half of 2022:

“It won’t be June, but likely in a few months after. No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter of [proof of work] on Ethereum.”

As ethereum nears major update, The Merge will mean the end of the proof of work mining on the network and mining involves the use of high-end computers to solve complex mathematical puzzles so it Is how the new ETH coins are created and how the transactions are verified on the network. Once the network gets switched over to PoS, the miners will be replaced by the validators that stake ETH to validate and to secure the network and get rewarded in ETH for doing so. The expectation is that this will reduce the amount of energy consumed by the blockchain and will slash new ETH issuance by 90% which market analysts think could add more pressure to ETH if the demand for the asset remains high.

As it prepares for upgrading the mainnet, the ETH foundation bumped up the rewards on offer from the bug bounty program launched in 2021. the program offers payouts in the tiered system that offers the most for critical vulnerabilities which have a high impact and a high likelihood of occuring. It now has combined what were two separate programs for the execution of ETH 1 and ETH 2 layers. The bug bounty hunters can earn up to $250,000 payable in ETH or DAI for identifying the vulnerabilities which are within the scope of the program.

The program upped it to $50,000 payouts to make sure the Merge doesn’t introduce vulnerabilities to the network which sees billions of dollars worth of transactions each day. As of Wednesday, Ethereum was trading at $1,968 and had a market cap of $238 million. The max Ethereum bounty for reporting vulnerabilities in the upgrades that are live on public testnets or scheduled to be released on the ETH mainnet is doubled right now and brought to a ceiling of $500,000. Developer Fredrik Svantes wrote:

“There are already multiple efforts being organized by client teams and the community to further increase knowledge and expertise across the two layers. Unifying the Bounty Program will further increase visibility and coordination efforts on identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities.”