According to Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation and one of the core developers of the network, the difficulty bomb-delaying Ethereum fork went live on the network on Thursday seamlessly. The testnet of Sepolia has also been programmed to run through its trial in Merge over the next few days and will be the second last testnet to go through the trial before the official Merge took place.
According to a report from Etherscan, the hard fork of Gray Glacier found itself initiated on block number 15050000 at around 6:54 EST on Thursday. The Ethereum Fork will now see it getting delayed through the difficulty bomb by roughly 700,000 blocks or 100 days, something that would give developers time till the middle of October to complete the long-awaited Merge.
Ethereum Fork Has Been A Success
Tim Beiko, also the community manager of Ethereum Foundation, went on to note on Twitter on Thursday that at around 20 blocks past the Ethereum hard fork, all of the monitored notes were functioning in sync. Nethermind, the ecosystem developer of Ethereum did tweet the confirmation of the success of the Ethereum fork, where they stated that the difficulty bomb had been delayed successfully. For those who are unaware, the difficulty bomb is a mechanism that has been put in place to gradually disincentivize Ether miners from mining on the proof-of-work scale on Ethereum before the eventual merge of the network with the proof-of-stake based Beacon Chain.
This entire procedure is conducted by increasing the difficulty level of all the puzzles that are contained in the PoW mining algorithm, which results in longer block times as well as fewer ETH mining rewards. This mechanism will also definitely make the Ethereum hard fork merge significantly more complicated for the developers to complete due to a complete gradual slowing of the block creation.
