• The merge of ETH1.0 and ETH2.0 will occur in 6 months or more from now says lead Ethereum developer Vitalik Buterin.
• In the meantime, Ethereum validator nodes have increased to 200,000, and over $14B is now staked in ETH 2.0 ahead of migration to Proof-of-Stake.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder, has spoken about the expected timeline of the Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0 merger. He was quoted at the World Blockchain Conference hosted by 8BTC in Hangzhou Future Sci-tech City, saying:

…upcoming very soon, we have the Altair Hard Fork on the Proof of Stake chain. The London Hard Fork is under the existing Proof of Work chain. At some point, maybe about half a year from now maybe more, we will get the merge, which is when the Proof of Work chain is finished and everything on the Proof of Work chain gets moved over onto the Proof of Stake chain.

Additionally, the Ethereum CEO said that following the much-anticipated merge, a post-merge cleanup fork will ensue. The cleanup’s idea is to fix some necessary aspects not done by the hard fork implementing the merge. An example of this is that the merge won’t facilitate withdrawals.

At the moment, all who have staked in the Proof of Stake system cannot make withdrawals of their deposits or rewards. Following the merge, withdrawals will still be undoable until after the post-merge cleanup, says Buterin.

Ethereum Proof-of-Stake implementation

Thereafter, Buterin says sharding will be the second development. Data shards are capable of giving Rollups 20-50 times more space, which translates to higher scalability. Eventually, this feature will support up to 100,000 transactions per second on the future Ethereum network.

Initially, sharding will have a basic level of security, the developer noted. However, as sharding upgrades, so will the security features. At this, he spoke about data availability sampling, which is a technology for improving sharding security. With it, nodes can verify that data in the shards is published without making massive data downloads.

Importantly, data availability sampling ensures that applications do not crush with increased scaling and huge data loads. Such an unfortunate incident would happen if blocks get accepted where there is no data access. Buterin concluded his speech, saying:

I think over the next 2 or 3 years, we’re going to see it become much cheaper to use Ethereum. And we’re going to see it become more possible for many more kinds of applications to use Ethereum. And the Ethereum ecosystem is going to become a lot more interesting and fun.

High merge expectations

The migration to Proof of Stake has received many delays in the past, which Buterin says are due to personal and not technical faults. However, there is much hype surrounding this development as validator nodes have increased by 20,000 in a month to 200,000+. Additionally, ETH staked in the network stands at over 6.6 million coins, which is worth over $14 billion.

So far, the amount of staked ETH is 5 percent of the total circulating ETH supply. The annual percentage yield (APY) on staked ETH now stands at 6.1 percent on the Ethereum network. Meanwhile, Ethereum is now trading at $2,399, up 4.4 percent in 24-hours, according to our data.

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