Ethereum’s Bellatrix on Sept 6 and Merge in The Following Week

The first step of the Ethereum merge testnet Bellatrix is coming up on the 6th Sept with the final merge just around the corner.

Keep your September free for all these new announcements regarding Ethereum! Most of the developers have agreed that they would aim to have the Bellatrix upgrade live around Sept. 6, 2022. Bellatrix is the name of the upgrade that will kick off the process of the Merge and set everything in motion. There will be a 14-day period between the Bellatrix upgrade and the mainnet Merge. That's the length of time that will pass before the network reaches a specific total terminal difficulty (TTD) which, in turn, will activate the Merge. The tentative TTD mark is 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000. Nothing is final, however, until it's codified in a client release.

At the beginning of the call, developers briefly went over the Goerli testnet merge that occurred early Thursday morning at 01:45 UTC. Developers agreed that it was a successful merge and that the network is healthy, even though the participation rate did drop briefly to 70%; it has since gone back up. The test is a two-step process, this first step is known as Bellatrix, which is when Goerli's Beacon Chain, Prater, upgrades in preparation for the testnet merge. Bellatrix will be completed at epoch 112,260. Once Bellatrix is activated, it will next merge with Goerli when it hits a Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) of 10,790,000. After the two merges, Goerli will continue to run as a PoS blockchain. But the functions of this merge differ greatly from previous testnet merges.

Today, Goerli runs under proof-of-authority (PoA), which is a protocol where machines earn the right to generate new blocks by passing a strict vetting process. As a result, trustworthy validation machines protect PoA blockchains. These system moderators are pre-approved participants who check blocks and transactions.