Ethereum developer Tim Beiko recently updated on Twitter that ETH POS Merge “will be a more complicated upgrade than previous ones”. Therefore, he added that they will need some "extra buffer over their regular update schedules" as they ramp up the EIP-4345 update. He added,
“A lot of the work will go into “disaster recovery” case planning, which is very difficult to estimate.”
He further explained that developers will likely update their nodes more than once as they will use the proof-of-work difficulty to define the Merge. He added,
"The difficulty bomb is based on the current network hashrate, and if the hashrate drops quickly before the merger (as the miners want to sell their GPUs), that could accelerate the bomb's advent."
With this event in mind, the date of the EIP-4345 Difficulty Bomb has been postponed. It was scheduled to explode in December, but will now be pushed back to June 2022. In this context, Beiko reasoned:
“We need all client teams to be ready for the merger and different teams can feel comfortable with different schedules.”
Beiko warned that pushing the bomb twice could "stop the fusion's progress" and scheduling it "too far away" could cause it to lose its "utility power function." But, he added,
“We would like this to be the last time we push the bomb back, but everyone agrees that having a safe, well-tested fusion is the most important thing by far, and we're fine with pushing the bomb back twice if necessary. ”
Essentially, the Ethereum Improvement Proposal stated that it aims for the merger to take place before June 2022. However, if the merger is not ready by then, EIP-4345 could be further delayed by the looks of things. On the contrary, Beiko stated that there are too many “unknowns”, and there is also the possibility that the Ethereum Bomb Upgrade prep too.
Therefore, Beiko thought that four months is a 'generous deadline' to run the code before Merge on the main network.
Additionally, ETH developers recently released Amphora, another crucial update for Merge. The various stages of the update included milestones M1, M2, M3 and M4 which focused on implementing merge specifications such as increasing technical complexity and node diversity. In addition, Beiko also updated that Pithos, the new devnet, was also successfully released.
Beiko quoted another developer and said that having a clear set of milestones has helped with the successful updates so far. And they plan to maintain that approach as the network moves towards The Merge.
