The final countdown to Ethereum Merge: All you need to know

moneycontrol.com:

Ethereum Merge is now done, after six years in the making. The second-most valuable cryptocurrency will switch from a proof-of-work (PoW) model to a proof-of-stake (PoS) one, which is projected to be significantly more energy and cost-efficient.

Ethereum's price currently stands at $1,604 with a market cap of nearly $201 billion, having dropped from a high of $1,648.19 on September 15 as per Coinmarketcap. Currently, Bitcoin has a market cap of around $385 billion, and the token is trading for $20,142.49.

Touted to be the biggest crypto event since the creation of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we take a look at what this really means, and what are the pros and cons the crypto investors might want to think over.

This is the single-most important feature of the merge, which changes it all. Unlike the PoW way of solving mathematical puzzles to mine tokens, PoS involves users or in this case validators deposit their holdings (stake) and lock them on the blockchain to create a block validate new transactions and blocks.

So, it’s a consensus mechanism where validators take over the job of block creation from miners.

According to experts, PoS can save as much as 99 percent of the energy involved in mining as compared to Bitcoin. Buterin had said that with PoS he aims to slash 99.95 per cent energy required. Reduction in energy usage will also enable institutional investors to trade more.

The gas fees or transaction fees too are expected to come down significantly. The blockchain will also be able to process much more transactions per second as compared to the previous version. As per media reports, Ethereum 2.0 can handle 100,000 transactions per second against around 30 transactions per second in the previous version.

The biggest concern