Ethereum completes the Merge on Kiln testnet

Ethereum is one step closer to the Merge.

An eventual transition from the PoW to the PoS consensus was outlined since Ethereum white paper was presented to the public in 2014.
Project with a long-term roadmap, Ethereum has since successfully reached and passed the stages of Frontier, Homestead and Metropolis, and is now working on completing the Serenity stage.

? The first step – the rollout of the Beacon Chain with PoS consensus – was accomplished in December 2020, and it now exists as a parallel chain to the Ethereum Mainnet. The users have staked over 10M ETH on its deposit contract since the rollout – a necessary condition to be able to compete for producing new blocks once Ethereum changes consensus.

⛙ The next step towards Serenity will be the merge of the Mainnet (also called execution layer) and the Beacon Chain (also called consensus layer). It will effectively switch Ethereum to the PoS consensus and free it from the controversy surrounding the PoW, while increasing the throughput and decreasing the fees.

? ? Ethereum, like virtually any tech project, has faced many setbacks and delays before, so there are quite a few sceptics who doubt that the merge will take place in Q2 2022, as announced.
Yesterday, however, Ethereum did come a step closer: the merge was successfully implemented on the Kiln testnet.
Successor to the previous merge testnet, Kiln is expected to be the last merge testnet created before existing public testnets (Goerli, Ropsten, etc.) are upgraded. Once these have successfully transitioned and stabilized, it will be possible to estimate the exact date for The Merge.

⛓️ After the Merge is done, the next upgrade will bring in the sharding, which would increase the capacity of the network and improve transaction speed by extending the network to 64 blockchains.

Ethereum developers still have a long road ahead to reach Serenity, but the steps they take are in the right direction.