- sidechain for Ethereum A Merge will be carried out by Gnosis Chain on December 8.
- Following the Ethereum Merge, Gnosis Chain switches from PoA to PoS.
- In the history of the blockchain industry, this will be the second Merge.
Gnosis Chain, a major Ethereum sidechain, will perform a Merge today (8 December), transitioning from a proof-of-authority (PoA) beacon chain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) beacon chain.
The Merge will take place today once the predetermined Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) is reached. TTD is used to schedule the fork in PoA chains.
This will be the blockchain industry’s second Merge, following the switch from PoW to PoS on the Ethereum blockchain in September. Gnosis Merge, on the other hand, will be unique in that it will transition from PoA to PoS.
Validators stake their reputation by adding blocks to the blockchain using proof-of-authority (PoA). Users must meet certain requirements in order to be trustworthy and maintain their good standing. This mechanism protects the system’s integrity by ensuring that all validators who participate are trustworthy and follow the same rules.
Furthermore, PoA, like PoS, is an energy-efficient consensus mechanism because validators require fewer computational resources to deploy. However, PoA is much more centralized than PoS because only a few validators are approved to participate in the network by a group of authorities.
Authorities put validators through a rigorous pre-approval process to ensure that they meet a set of requirements and that transactions are not tampered with before they are added to the blockchain.
Encouraging blockchains to switch to PoS with the Ethereum Merge?
The success of Ethereum’s Merge showed that a procedure this complicated is feasible. The confidence of blockchain developers has increased as they work to finish their own Merge. Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, had also expressed support for a PoS conversion for Dogecoin.
Contrary to many Ethereum killers who favour scalability over decentralisation, economic blockchain space is a commodity while decentralised blockspace is a limited resource.
After the Merge, Gnosis will have more than 100,000 validators operating the blockchain, up from fewer than 20 before. Gnosis Chain is currently the blockchain with the second-highest number of validators, with almost 450 000.
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