Tim Beiko, an ETH core developer, in a blog post, elaborated on the much-awaited ‘The Merge’ which is supposed to happen in late 2022. He said the transitioning of ‘Ethereum to proof-of-stake is now clearly insight.’ 

At last, it seems that ‘The Merge’ will finally be released as we approach the end of 2022. After months of speculation and backlashes, the Ethereum Foundation looks to have a pathway to the release.

The Foundation now needs to test out mainnet shadow forks without issues, approval for merge suites, and smooth deployment across existing testnets. Once all of them are confirmed and approved, they will finally move on to the mainnet.

The Shadow forks are the first step required for approval by the Foundation. They allow the developers to observe how clients perform in conditions close to public networks. Multiple Goerli shadow forks along with two mainnet ones have been deployed. Another fork called MSF3 is set to launch this week.

The Merge is the biggest upgrade in the history of Ethereum and therefore requires new infrastructure to test cross-layer interactions. The Foundation has carried out many testing tools built by the entire Ethereum community including the clients as well. The Foundation will then await the results of the above steps before deploying the Merge to the existing public testnets. Finally, the process of transitioning the Ethereum mainnet to proof-of-stake will be like the process followed for testnets.

But before the ‘The Merge’ takes place, the Foundation must sort out long-existing issues such as the gas fees. 

The problem of Ethereum’s gas fees has again come to the fore after Vitalik Buterin’s latest comments. Since last year’s boom of the DeFi projects and the NFT industry, ETH transactions have been very high. 

Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 3, 2022

Ryan Adams, Founder of Mythos Capital, and Co-founder of the Bankless podcast tweeted in favor of ETH. He said that the fees have reduced over time while calling for a vote of support for the blockchain. 

On the other hand, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin then commented on the post and pushed for measures to reduce transaction fees. He said that the transactions need to be under ‘$0.05 to be truly acceptable’ while suggesting solutions for it. Buterin lamented on the application of proto- danksharding which should help with the gas fees.