Vitalik Buterin Joins The Merge Ethereum Party Leaves Proof Of Work

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. (photo: @VitalikButerin)

JAKARTA - During the countdown hours to the last moments of The Merge Ethereum, one of its founders Vitalik Buterin joined the live streaming of the Ethereum Mainnet Merger Party organized by the Ethereum Foundation to share his last thoughts.

When asked if he was happy with the Merger, Buterin replied that he was "absolutely excited to get out of the proof-of-work era."

The co-founder went on to say that the network's historic transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS) has been on the agenda for years:

This is definitely a dream for the Ethereum ecosystem from the start. We started research on proof of ownership with blog posts in Slosher in January 2014," Buterin said as quoted by Cointelegraph.

According to Buterin, this merger can be seen as the reinvention of physics law. PoW operates with the use of real-world functions such as electricity, hardware, and computers. As for PoS, everything is virtualized, and it basically allows us to create a simulated universe that has its own physics laws.

Buterin said that among the biggest motivations to switch is high costs and a large amount of energy use. The merger is said to drastically reduce energy consumption by 99.95%.

He also pointed out that this will not only be good for the environment, which has become a hot topic among environmentalists for the crypto space, but also for "non-invironmental externality." An example is the increase in GPU prices (graphic processor units) due to Ether (ETH) mining.

Shortly after Vitalik's mini-view on live streaming, Merger finally occurred on Thursday, September 15, at 06:42:42 UTC in block 15537393. The combination of the Ethereum mainnet execution layer and the Consensus Chain occurred at Terminal A total of 58750000,000,000. After the Merger, the network no longer depends on the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

And we finalized!Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022

Buterin congratulated the community and delivered the next Ethereum era through his tweets on Twitter.

This new optimization allows developers and users to scale up networks in ways that were unlikely or unsustainable in the past. This is an important step in encouraging mass adoption of decentralized technology and incorporating the next billion into the ecosystem.