The popularly used cryptocurrency Ethereum’s blockchain has successfully completed the long-awaited transition to proof-of-stake. This process of upgrading, more commonly referred to as “The Merge,” has been in the works for years. The Ethereum Foundation estimates that today’s shift will result in a 99.95% reduction in Ethereum’s overall energy consumption.

In the past, the Ethereum blockchain depended on a consensus method called proof-of-work. This mechanism involves a significant amount of computational effort from all of the decentralized nodes that are a part of the network.

The Ethereum blockchain is subject to a fundamental transformation as a result of the implementation of the proof-of-stake mechanism. As a result, mining new blocks is no longer necessary because the network may now be secured through the use of validators and ETH that has been pledged.

Beacon Chain, an independent proof-of-stake implementation, was initially released by Ethereum on December 1, 2020. It was functioning independently from the main Ethereum blockchain at the same time.

The Ethereum community announced the release of the Bellatrix upgrade on September 6, 2022, in order to initiate the process known as “The Merge.” After implementing this first upgrade, the Ethereum community came to the consensus that once the original Ethereum blockchain reached a certain Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) number, the proof-of-work chain will be replaced with the proof-of-stake chain.

And that particular occurrence took place earlier on 15 sept at 6:42 AM UTC, which kicked off the second phase of the changeover that is being referred to as the Paris upgrade.

“And with that, the conclusion!” On Twitter, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expressed his belief: Happy Merge, everybody. This is an important time for the ecosystem: “Everyone who played a role in making the integration happen should feel happy today.”

The following is a breakdown of how the process works, courtesy of the chart that can be seen on the blog of the Ethereum Foundation:

What exactly does this mean for people who use Ethereum? Due to the fact that it’s an improvement to the infrastructure, not much will change in the short term. Transactions, addressing, and wallets all continue to function as they did before.

However, the fact that the Ethereum blockchain uses significantly less electricity than other blockchains is already very exciting news. Rollup contracts will become the primary focus of many developers going forward in order to lower transaction costs and enable scalability.