Ethereum pulled off the biggest blockchain event of the year
When the history of the blockchain is written, one of the most defining moments will be the year-long process that culminated in September, when Ethereum developers carried out a massive upgrade to the protocol known as “the merge.”
Switching the core Ethereum blockchain mechanism from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) without downtime was no small task. It involved at least two years of testing and over 100 bi-weekly calls to maintain the $30 billion ecosystem that houses non-fungible tokens, crypto exchanges and other decentralized applications. Developers likened the task to replacing a car’s gas engine with an electric one while speeding down the highway.
Read more: The Ethereum merger is complete, ushering in a new era for the second largest blockchain
Vitalik Buterin is the co-founder, visionary and spiritual leader of the Ethereum ecosystem. He wrote the original white paper for Ethereum in 2014, laying out the steps the blockchain would tackle in the years ahead, including the merger.
Buterin had six years of Bitcoin’s existence to observe and improve. By moving from proof-of-work – Bitcoin’s mechanism that used miners who used enormous computing power, and therefore enormous energy, to add transactions to the digital ledger – to proof-of-stake, which instead uses validators to approve blocks to the blockchain, Ethereum will reduce its carbon footprint by 99.9%. It will also increase the security of the blockchain and allow developers to introduce scalable upgrades to the blockchain in the future.
While the vision and basic plan were Buterin’s, what made the merger an exceptionally difficult task was that the Ethereum developers prioritized keeping the chain alive during the switch.
“There’s a much simpler way to do the merge: We shut down for three days, do the thing, and flip the switch back on, and it starts again,” said Tim Beiko, protocol support lead at the Ethereum Foundation (EF). “We probably would have saved somewhere between a quarter and a third of the work. So it was pretty wild to make this transition happen, basically seamlessly in a way that was incentive compatible with miners.”
The merger could not have been achieved without dozens of teams of developers, researchers and volunteers, both in Ethereum core and its customers. A client is a piece of software used by the nodes that run the blockchain. EF, a Swiss non-profit organization dedicated to the building of Ethereum, coordinated the many customer teams (at least nine of them with about 10-20 people per team) that built the testing, tooling, and actual proof-of-stake Beacon Chain into the proof-of -work version of Ethereum merged. The massive work involved several test nets, which are development versions of the blockchain to verify the soundness of the tasks. Many incremental steps had to be taken before the merger could proceed.
Among all these contributors, here are some key developers who took this eight-year-old idea of Buterin and wanted it to happen, and managed to pull off the massive upgrade that took place on September 15:
Tim Beiko
Beiko has been the head of protocol support at EF since January 2021. He often leads the agenda at Ethereum’s All Core Developers Calls, a bi-weekly meeting of the network’s core engineers, and was responsible for coordinating the client teams working on EF.
When he’s not coordinating and directing traffic for dozens of teams, Beiko decompresses by looking after and walking his dog, Dodam, named after a Hong Kong restaurant that specializes in Korean fried chicken.
Ben Edgington
An occasional pastor (he gives Sunday sermons at a Baptist church from time to time), Edgington is the lead product owner at Teku, an Ethereum client built by R&D firm ConsenSys. Edgington built out the Teku product team, where he worked closely with the ConsenSys Besu team, Ethereum’s execution client.
Parithos Jayanthi
Jayanthi has been a devops engineer at EF since December 2020, after discovering on Twitter that EF was looking to fill the position. An avid fan of fusion music, Jayanthi pioneered the Beacon Chain testing and helped coordinate shadow forks, which were crucial tests that helped debug any issues that arose.
Mikhail Kalinin
Kalinin has a passion for detail and history, as evidenced by his hobby of reconstructing costumes from the 13th, 14th and 16th centuries. He is a leading researcher at ConsenSys which many developers have described as a significant driving force behind the merger; without him there may be no merger. He was instrumental in designing the mechanism itself and wrote the specifications for implementing the merger.
Marius Van Der Wijden
Even in his spare time, Van Der Wijden likes to build. He likes Factorio, the crowd-funded video game where he builds huge virtual factories. In his day job as a software developer at EF, in the run-up to the merger, Van Der Wijden wrote guides for the Consensus Layer clients to use their software with Geth, an Ethereum client. He also created tools used under shadow forks to create bad blocks that could identify problems in some clients.
Hsiao-Wei Wang
Wang has been a researcher at EF since 2017, where she worked on sharding, a method that would help deal with network congestion and high gas fees by spreading transactions across databases, or “shards”. Eventually, she was drawn to work on the merge, working specifically on Consensus Layer specifications.
Back in August 2021, Wang created a famous meme to visually express the merger both in concept and progress over time. A white bear (proof-of-work Ethereum) and a black bear (proof-of-stake Beacon Chain) do the Dragon Ball Z Fusion dance, moving closer and closer until they transform into a black and white panda. The meme went viral and was even turned into NFT, the proceeds of which she partially dedicated to non-profit animal welfare organizations.
Sajida Zouarhi
Zouarhi joined ConsenSys as a research engineer in 2017 and then became product manager for Besu, an Ethereum execution client, as the merger was built until June when most of the heavy lifting was completed. Her main priorities included working with core developers and laying out what the priorities were for the Besu client team.
Zouarhi is an avid fan of “Star Wars” and especially the red-and-black-faced Sith warrior and con artist Darth Maul, whom she likes to cosplay, and is currently a product manager at Blocknative, where she works on Maximal Extractable Value ( MEV).
Read more: Meet 8 Ethereum developers who helped make the merger possible
What will be next?
Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS was like the whole of Finland shutting down the power grid, according to Digiconomist. The direct impact of the event also led to a worldwide reduction in energy consumption by 0.2%.
With the merger complete, Buterin has shared a roadmap for Ethereum to address a number of issues including security, privacy, censorship, scalability issues and more, such as sharding.
The Ethereum developers said they hope they have inspired other blockchains, such as Dogecoin, to switch to PoS. PoW chains have come under more scrutiny from regulators due to their environmental impacts. Edgington shared that the EU is “already talking about turning off PoW because of the energy crisis.”
“It’s fair for them to have waited for Ethereum and said ‘this thing works.’ And now that it does, I honestly don’t think there’s any reason why they shouldn’t move over,” Beiko told CoinDesk.
To make that process easier, developers have shared their Merge resources with the rest of the world. “If someone wants to go through the merger, they can just take it and reuse the test infrastructure,” Jayanthi said.
