The Bellatrix upgrade is set to happen in less than ten days, and all eyes are on Ethereum: Its price, the readiness of its nodes for the merge, and everything else.
Despite pushing higher in terms of price earlier in the week, the bulls appear to have lost momentum as the merge approaches, and the buzz starts to get hotter.
On the Ethereum price chart, lower highs and lower lows can be observed, suggesting bearishness. The bullishness in price the cryptocurrency experienced earlier in the week started strong but waned when it reached the resistance of the 200-P daily moving average (in green).
If the buyers manage to retake control of the market, we might see the price inch closer to $1,720. Alternatively, the support zone sits at around $1,420. A break below this point will dash any hopes Ethereum has of starting a pre-merge bullish rally.
The need to update the network's nodes is pressing if the merge is successful. As of September 6th, only 73.5% of the Ethereum network's nodes are marked as "merge ready." An important thing to note is that the discussion involving Ethereum's upgrade is not a new one. It has been around for a while now.
This upgrade will see the network move from a Proof Of Work consensus Mechanism to Proof Of Stake, eliminating the need for miners and now requiring the services of its token holders to validate transactions.
Updating the network's client nodes becomes necessary to be ready for this upgrade. Ethereum client-node operators must comply by updating the consensus layer on their nodes before epoch 144896 on the beacon chain (scheduled to happen around 11:34 am UTC on September 6th, 2022).
However, only 73.5% of nodes are ready at this point. This means that 26.5% of its nodes are still designated as "not ready" for the merge.
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and core developer Tim Beiko have taken to Twitter to urge the remaining node operators to update their nodes.
According to the Ethereum Foundation, node operators who fail to make their nodes ready for the upgrade before the Bellatrix hard fork will find themselves "stuck on an incompatible chain following old rules, and will be unable to send ether or operate on the post-merge Ethereum network."
According to ethereum.org, most nodes designated as "not-ready" are on the GEth (Go Ethereum) client and have yet to upgrade to GEth V1.10.23 or higher. While nodes on the GEth client contribute the most to the number of "not-ready" clients, others include nodes on the Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind clients.
The upgrade's last part will be called the "Paris Event". An event that will be triggered when the TTD (terminal total difficulty) of the network reaches 58750000000000000000000 (19 zeros).
The Paris event is estimated to occur around September 15th. Right after the Paris Event, when the execution layer surpasses this TTD value, the chain will be produced by a beacon-chain validator, making the final transition of the network from POW to POS.
Ethereum holders, before the merge, do not need to do anything with their holdings. The network that results from the merge will be backward-compatible in some ways, and ETH tokens/assets will still be valid.
ETH holders, however, should be on the lookout for scams designed to get access to their private keys or wipe their wallets clean.
Disclaimer: The author's comments and recommendations are solely for educational and informative purposes. They do not represent any financial or investment advice. Always DYOR (do your own research)