Dispel the mist around The Merge(Ethereum upgrade), the most major update in Ethereum’s history. Here are five myths that stand out from the others.
Unintentionally, stories have spread across the community as a result of the enthusiasm around Ethereum’s (ETH) forthcoming upgrade, The Merge, which entails the combination of two blockchains — Mainnet Ethereum and Beacon Chain.
The Merge, dubbed the most important update in Ethereum’s history, does, in fact, signal the end of proof-of-work (PoW) for the Ethereum blockchain. However, the following five myths stand out from the others.
Myth 1: Ethereum Upgrade gas costs will decrease
One of the greatest myths among investors is that Ethereum’s upcoming update would lower its notorious gas prices (transaction fees). While lower gas costs are the number one desire of all investors, The Merge is a consensus mechanism modification that will switch the Ethereum blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake (PoS).
Instead, Ethereum will need to concentrate on increasing the network’s throughput and capacity. To reduce transaction costs, the developer community is presently developing a rollup-centric roadmap.
Myth 2: Ethereum transactions will move more quickly.
We can presume that Ethereum transactions won’t be much quicker. There is some truth to this claim, however, since Beacon Chain permits validators to publish a block every 12 seconds, or around 13.3 seconds on the Mainnet.
Although Ethereum experts predict that switching to PoS would allow a 10% increase in block generation, consumers won’t notice the tiny difference.
Myth 3: Ethereum Upgrade will cause its blockchain to go down.
Contrary to common belief, which predicts favorable effects for Ethereum from The Merge, a rumor has claimed that the scheduled update would briefly bring down the Ethereum network.
As blocks go from being generated using PoW to being built using PoS, the developers don’t expect any downtime.
Myth 4: Investors will be able to withdraw staked ETH.
The Beacon Chain is presently locked with Staked ETH (stETH), a coin that is backed 1:1 by ETH. Users would prefer to be able to withdraw their stETH holdings, however, the development community has stated that this modification is not made possible by the update.
The Shanghai upgrade, the following significant upgrade after The Merge, will enable the withdrawal of stETH holdings. Because of this, the assets won’t be able to be used for at least 6 to 12 months following the merger.
Myth 5: Until the Shanghai upgrade, validators won’t be able to withdraw their ETH awards.
Validators will have instant access to the fee rewards and maximum extractable value (MEV) earned during block proposals from the execution layer or Ethereum Mainnet, while stETH remains restricted for investors until withdrawals are restored after the Shangai upgrade.
The fee reimbursement will be accessible to the validator right away since it won’t be made up of freshly issued tokens.
According to Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic, the smart contract protocol will be able to outperform Visa in terms of transaction throughput thanks to zkEVM Rollups, a novel scaling option for Ethereum.
Bjelic’s ideas were mirrored by Polygon’s other co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, who saw the solution reducing Ethereum costs by 90% and boosting transaction throughput to 40–50 transactions per second.
