Gray Glacier Upgrade Is Finally Live On The Ethereum Network

The Gray Glacier upgrade is finally live on the Ethereum network which will push the difficulty bomb by another 100 days so let’s read more in our today’s Ethereum news.

The Gray Glacier upgrade is the latest one on the network which will push the difficulty bomb by another 100 days. The upgrade occurred at block 15,050,000 with a goal of introducing changes to the parameters of the network’s difficulty bomb that pushed it back by 700,000 blocks or by 100 days. The upgrade is the network’s hard fork which means it is creating new rules to improve the system and requires the operators and miners to download a new version of their ETH clients. The Ethereum Foundation said:

“If you are using an Ethereum client that is not updated to the latest version, […] your client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the upgrade occurs.”

In other words, the clients are stuck on an incompatible chain after the old rules which means they will not be able to send transactions or operate on the upgraded  Ethereum network. Not all operators and miners followed the recommendations as the data from Ethernodes shows that up o 65% of the clients are prepared for the upgrade. Geth which is the most popular client was 67% with up to 448 clients running the outdated software but Nethermind and Besuhad 76% and 78% of the clients updated.

The bomb was a part of the Ethereum network since the first day and it is a piece of code that is responsible for increasign the difficulty of mining ETH and the network’s native crypto so it disincentivized miners to continue their operations as the network transitions from the PoW algorithm to PoS consensus model. In other words, the difficulty bomb will mean that the transition known as The Merge can be around the corner. The implementation of the Merge went live on the Ropsten testnet at the start of June with Vitalik buterin and other developers saying that if everything goes well, the transition can happen by August.

Pushing back the bomb for another 100 days, it is highly unlikely that the schedule will be met with the EIP-5133 proposal pointing to mid-September as a new time frame for the implementation. The difficulty bomb mechansim has been pushed back in other upgrades as well such as Muir Galcier, London, Constantinopole, Byzantium, and Arrow Glacier.