The ‘Merge’ — the much-awaited upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain — finally completed on September 15, marking a historic milestone in the blockchain and crypto industries. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum announced the launch of the Merge on Twitter, calling this a “big moment” for the Ethereum ecosystem. Essentially, now the Ethereum blockchain has transitioned to an energy-efficient ‘proof-of-stake (POS)’ mining model from its previous, power intensive ‘proof-of-work (POW)’ mining model. This upgrade has slashed Ethereum blockchain’s power consumption by 99.95 percent.

Developers who worked on this Merge upgrade believe that this revamp will make the Ethereum network, which is most commercialised and handles billions of dollars in transactions and holdings, more scalable and secure.

“And we finalised!” wrote Buterin in his Twitter post.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao was among several others from the blockchain community to welcome Ethereum’s Merge upgrade.

The process of re-coding Ethereum into the POS model has been a long one, filled with several technical roadblocks which led to several delays to the Merge launch.

Projects and blockchain firms reliant on Ethereum now have to choose if their operations would solely run on the Merge upgrade or manage this efficient version with the previous energy-intensive one.

OpenSea, Tether and Circle Pay — the issuer of USD Coin — have already pledged to only rely on the Merge version of Ethereum going forward.

Recently, a DappRadar report has alerted the crypto community to get their Ethereum-related affairs in order because the stablecoins and transactions backed on the Ethereum blockchain could encounter some snags.

Meanwhile, the bug bounty payouts for Ethereum can now go as high as $1 million (roughly Rs. 8 crore), developers of the blockchain said in a recent update, encouraging software developers to keep an eye out on potential risks around the newly launched upgrade.