The long-awaited Ethereum Merge upgrade’s formal parameters have been made public by the Ethereum Foundation. The Bellatrix upgrade will be released by Beacon Chain on September 6. The rest of the Merge procedure is set in motion by this update. The activation is scheduled for Beacon Chain epoch 144896, which should happen around 11:34:47 UTC.
After this, the the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) TTD number that makes the Merge happen will be 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This TTD is expected to be reached between September 10 and September 20. In past calls, the Ethereum Developers have talked about September 15-16 as a target date.
During this time, the level of difficulty will rise to the point where it will no longer be possible to mine using proof-of-work.
When TTD reaches 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000, the network’s Execution layer will be merged with the new Consensus layer, and the network will switch to the new proof-of-stake consensus protocol.
Before the Merge, the changes from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake were tested on a number of test networks (testnets), such as Ropsten, Sepolia, and Goerli.
