Ethereum upgrades technology to cut CO2 output by 99%: Report

business-standard.com:

Ethereum has completed a key revamp of its blockchain network, marking the crypto world’s most-ambitious software upgrade to date. As a result, Ethereum’s carbon consumption will decline by an estimated 99 per cent. Called the Merge, the upgrade completed in the early hours of Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted.

The change replaced power-hungry computers that were used to order transactions on the network with a more energy-efficient set-up using piles of the network’s native token, Ether, placed in special, so-called staking wallets.

Such an upheaval had never been attempted in crypto before, let alone on Ethereum, home to about 3,500 active decentralised apps, ranging from exchanges to games and handling billions of dollars worth of crypto. In the works for years, the Merge doesn’t change the end-user experience on the second-biggest blockchain, but it’s a key stepping stone to more upgrades that will make the network faster and cheaper, and should further increase its stature and usage.

The software upgrade is called the Merge because the existing Ethereum blockchain will combine with a parallel network that’s been running for almost two years to test the proof-of-stake concept. Overall, the upgrade has been under consideration for over seven years.

“This is the first step in Ethereum’s big journey toward being a very mature system,” Buterin said during an online Merge viewing party — essentially a public video call where developers tracked live progress on the switch. “And there’s steps left to go. We still have to scale, we have to fix privacy. To me the Merge symbolises the difference between an early stage Ethereum and the Ethereum we’ve always wanted.”

As it became clear the transition had