OpenEthereum Ended Support For Its Software With Merge Approaching

OpenEthereum ended support for its software with the Merge approach in order to prepare so let’s see more in today’s latest Ethereum news.

The OpenEthereum team added:

“The usefulness has run its course, we look forward to the next phase of clean, green and massively scalable blockchain infrastructure.”

📢 OpenEthereum support has officially ended.

The repo is now archived, and all maintenance and updates have stopped.

Why? And what next?

Read the 🧵

— OpenEthereum is Deprecated (@OpenEthereumOrg) May 24, 2022

One of the biggest Ethereum clients, OpenEthereum, ended support for its software in order to prepare for the upcoming Ethereum merge. OpenEthereum created “clients” or software used to interact with the ETH network allowing anyone to create an ETH node and mine cryptocurrency which is using a PoW consensus mechanism. In a Twitter thread, the team explained that with the Merge approaching and the legacy codebase becoming hard to manage because of its age, this is the right time to end the support.

The project was owned by blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies before moving to the OpenEthereum decentralzied autonomous organization in 2019. at the time, Parity wrote they wanted to ensure that the codebase is maintained and lives on for as long as the community finds it useful:

“The usefulness has run its course, and we look forward to the next phase of clean, green and massively scalable blockchain infrastructure.”

The OpenEthereum team wrote that it has “well documented” clients that were required to navigate the upcoming Merge and a shift to PoS by directing users to change clients to other providers like Erigon and Nethermind. The Merge is a name for an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain that will merge the PoS Beacon Chain back in 2020 into the current PoW main net that validates transactions on the network. The upgrade saw plenty of delays since first proposed in 2016 and had a deployment date of 2019 it is believed that the Merge can happen in mid-2022 but the delays happened in April.

Because of the upcoming Repsten testnet merge, the ETH Developer Preston Van said the upgrade will happen by August 2022 if everything goes to plan.

As recently reported, If the developers can complete the merge in August, they won’t have to worry about the difficulty bomb that might go off. The difficulty bomb will start slowing down the entire network so the Ethereum developers are hoping to transition to a PoS faster which will negate the need for an update to delay the bomb.