Everything You Need To Know About Ethereum Merge and How It Affects Media Network
A massive Ethereum blockchain upgrade is scheduled around September 15, 2022 (TTD 58750000000000000000000), dropping Proof of Work (PoW) to adopt the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
Such a transition, called “The Merge,” will mark the culmination of years of careful and detailed planning by developers and the community, reducing Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.95%.
What are some differences between PoW and PoS?
As explained by Coinbase, Proof of Stake blockchains don’t require miners to spend electricity on repetitive processes (competing to solve the same puzzle). Proof of Stake allows networks to operate with substantially lower resource consumption.
Both consensus mechanisms have economic consequences that penalize network disruptions and thwart malicious actors. In Proof of Work, the penalty for miners submitting invalid information, or blocks, is the sunk cost of computing power, energy, and time.
In Proof of Stake, the validators’ staked crypto funds serve as an economic incentive to act in the network’s best interests. If a validator accepts a bad block, a portion of their staked funds will be “slashed” as a penalty.
Potential block verifiers, who would become “validators” rather than miners, must deposit a minimum of 32 ETH to participate.
What happens with the “old” PoW chain?
If enough miners secure the network, the PoW chain will continue operating, creating what is commonly known as a “fork.”
A fork happens whenever a community changes the blockchain’s protocol or fundamental rules. When this happens, the chain splits — producing a second blockchain that shares all of its histories with the original, but is headed off in a new direction.
The difficulty bomb is intended to “freeze” the old chain by increasing “the difficulty level of puzzles” for the proof-of-work algorithm, which would result in reduced block production times and rewards for miners.
The idea behind this difficulty increase is to force miners to shut down or switch the hash power to another GPU-compatible cryptocurrency, such as ETC or RVN.
Media Network Smart Contracts
Several weeks ago, we previewed in our “Roadmap Update” article the launch of Media Network on Ethereum to empower developers to create new decentralized solutions.
The Media Foundation is excited to announce that we will deploy the new Media Network EVM smart contracts exclusively on the Ethereum PoS chain. ERC20 PoS $MEDIA will be required to interact with the dCDN.
As we highly recognize the importance of Ethereum — the first truly decentralized open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality — we have decided to focus all our resources on this launch, aiming to expand Media Network’s dCDN worldwide adoption.
In the upcoming weeks, the Ethereum developer community will be able to interact and rapidly deploy new dCDN resources using the PoS chain and then distribute its off-chain data using Media Network’s dCDN using their preferred tools.
The process is designed so there will be no downtime, and the network should continue operating as planned, adding new functionalities.
PoW $MEDIA & LP Tokens
All assets (ETH, ERC20, ERC721) held before the Merge will maintain the same balances on both PoW and PoS chains, and no action is required from the users’ end.
This applies to all MEDIA ERC20 holders and Liquidity Providers (LPs) on both Uniswap & Sushiswap.
Centralized exchanges will ONLY support ERC20 PoS $MEDIA. Do not try to send PoW $MEDIA to these exchanges after the merge, or your tokens might be lost forever.
Ethereum’s next steps
Once the merge is completed and the new consensus layer adopted, the developers will move forward with Ethereum’s upgrade plan, including the Surge, Verge, Purge, and Splurge. These phases will continue to make Ethereum’s blockchain more scalable and secure.
For example, the Merge will not immediately solve the above scalability issues. Still, it will help to prepare the network for the version of Ethereum that hosts subsidiary shard chains that will rely on a fully functional PoS network to operate.
By spreading the network’s data load across 64 blockchains, shard chains provide cheaper layers for applications and rollups to store data.
They also allow L2 systems to offer low transaction fees while taking advantage of the security of Ethereum’s core network.
About Media Network
Media Network is a blockchain agnostic, censorship-resistant, and community-powered dCDN enforced by smart contracts. We’ve created a decentralized bandwidth market that enables anyone to hire or provide resources from the network as the demand for last-mile content delivery shifts.
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