Merging Eth1 and Eth2
Ethereum’s transition from the PoW consensus mechanism to the PoS consensus mechanism has been a long journey. It started with the beacon chain as a separate blockchain that operated under PoS, with the purpose of testing PoS. Although it has been live since December 2020, it didn’t process any Ethereum transactions until the merge in September 2022. The merge of the Eth1 chain and the Eth2 beacon chain will facilitate the transition to PoS and create a unified chain going forward. We will refer to the merged Eth1 and Eth2 as Ethereum going forward.
Merging Eth1 data into Eth2
The following is the pictorial view of how the unified chain looks after the merge. The merge is controlled by the difficulty bomb, which has been ingrained into the Eth1 protocol since 2015. As we discussed in Chapter 1, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, difficulty
is a mechanism to control the speed of new blocks being mined in a PoW-based blockchain. In Eth1, at a predefined...