For anyone who isn’t up to speed, the work towards the Merge, i.e. the transition to PoS, has progressed dramatically in the last year. There have been two major existing testnets that have been merged in the last few months, and Goerli will be the last one to undergo the transition from PoW to PoS.
In the meantime, Ethereum Mainnet has been shadow-forked nine times already, most recently today. These are effectively parallel chains that follow the real blocks that come in on Mainnet, and allow the developers to mimic what the real load will look like following the actual Merge.
Again, this is a tentative schedule. If even that. The Goerli Merge could go terribly wrong and uncover major flaws in the Merge transition mechanism*, so proceed with cautious optimism. The Merge is coming.
* The Merge is unlike any regular hard-fork: it’s based on the mining difficulty, not on the block height. When the network hits a terminal total difficulty (TTD), the current PoW consensus will be hot-swapped over to the PoS consensus clients. All in the span of one block.
