About 27% of Ethereum nodes are still not ready for The Merge of the mainnet with Beacon Chain and the transition to Proof-of-Stake. The next-to-last phase of the transition, the Bellatrix upgrade, will happen today.
According to Ethernodes, about 500 Ethereum nodes are not ready for The Merge. Meanwhile, most clients marked “Not-Ready” are in the Geth protocol, which was recently found to have a bug.
While testing the network’s readiness for the merge, a regression in the Geth protocol was discovered. The developers fixed it by releasing protocol v1.10.23. However, according to Ethernodes, as of September 6, 2022, 14:00 (GMT+3), about 30% of Geth nodes have not been upgraded to the version necessary for the merge.
The Bellatrix hard fork is the penultimate step before Ethereum fully switches to PoS. It began at epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain, which occurred today at 11:34 pm (UTC) or 2:34 pm (GMT+3).
If nodes are not upgraded to the necessary version for the Bellatrix merge, they will be “stuck on an incompatible chain.” Such nodes will not be able to send ETH or work on Ethereum after the network’s final transition to PoS.
While waiting for the event, some crypto exchanges decided to suspend transactions with ETH and wrapped ETH tokens. For example, Binance announced that it would stop issuing deposits and block withdrawals of ETH and WETH on September 6 from 02:00 (UTC) or 05:00 (GMT+3). The suspension of transactions in Arbitrum, OP, and RON networks will last until The Merge is completed. According to a Binance spokesperson, this is done to secure the distribution of forked tokens in the event of a split in the chain.
The upcoming event continues to push Ethereum up. The price of ETH has jumped 6.5% in the past 24 hours and is trading at $1,666, according to CoinMarketCap. Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains have also seen a 59% increase in trading volume over the past week. OpenSea data as of September 6 at 14:00 (GMT+3) indicates that the weekly ENS trading volume through the marketplace was 2,538 ETH, 15% higher than that of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection. And in the last 24 hours, ENS trading volume grew by 185% to 1,183 ETH.
Ethereum’s success also continues to attract institutional investors. CryptoCompare reports that Ethereum investment products increased by 2.36% in assets under management (AUM) in August.
