GM Famβ¦ and Good Merginβ!
This wasnβt the only ASCII art panda people saw β each consensus client sported its own text art for anybody celebrating the merge by watching their logs
Prysm
Lighthouse
Teku
Even if you didnβt get an ASCII panda for free in your logs, you could have paid a premium to do so. Below is the worldβs first NFT minted in the ETH proof of stake era:
From now on whenever you mint an NFT, burning a rainforest is no longer mandatory. Itβs now a wholly optional side quest.
Facts notwithstanding, itβs quite likely the environmental FUD will never go away among the willfully uniformed, so we may as well lean into it.
Other than more environmentally friendly NFTs, what should you expect in this new paradigm?
Lots of people were interested in the potential for The Merge to cause the markets to nuke or rip. In fact, the price basically did nothing. Maybe the Merge WAS priced in after all.
In terms of the effect The Merge has had on supply, itβs essentially flat. Issuance is no longer increasing, but only about 102 ETH has been burnt since the Merge.
The magic number is 15 gwei. Above this, ETH becomes deflationary, at 15 gwei and below ETH is inflationary. Weβve been fairly close to this number since the Merge, which is why the graph has been so steady.
Another big change in ETH POS is the timing of blocks.
Before the merge, block discovery was accomplished whenever miners found a new block β this timing was somewhat predictable but had some variability.
This variability is why the timing of the Merge couldnβt be predicted accurately. Several different countdowns had slightly different results. It ended up happening around 3 AM ET, hardly a desirable timeslot if the ETH team was looking to juice ratings.
In the new paradigm, block discovery time is utterly predictable.
The Merge itself played out very smoothly. The team expected to lose about 10-20% of validators, but just 4% are offline.
Weβve also seen one slashing event already.
There was a short spike in failed transactions, but this appears to have leveled off.
With few available options for proof of work miners, the hashrate has spiked on Ethereum Classic and Ravencoin.
The proof of work chain is not expected to launch until about 24 hours after The Merge, so we may expect the comic aftershow to begin until tonight.
Before The Merge, a number of wrapped ETH tokens were trading at under 1 ETH. Perhaps itβs the success of The Merge, but the prices of these are tiptoeing towards parity.
Perhaps most importantly, a number of protocols were waiting until after The Merge to launch their services. Get ready for shipping season.