The Ethereum 'Merge' has happened and marks a new era for greener cryptos and blockchain

euronews.com:

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has undergone a significant transformation that will change its technology to cut carbon emissions by more than 99.9 per cent, according to its platform Ethereum.

The transition known as "the Merge" has been finalised, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed on Thursday.

"And we finalized!... Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem," he said in a tweet. 

It means its blockchain technology has been upgraded from the intensive energy-consuming model used by its rival Bitcoin.

While anticipation around the move has seen the price of Ethereum’s token, Ether (ETH), double in the last two months, not everyone is looking forward to the change.

Euronews Next looks at what is changing and how the transformation may affect the crypto market.

The first part of the Merge upgrade began on September 6 with the Bellatrix upgrade, which marked a so-called "hard fork" which will convert Ethereum from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) base.  

The switch will take Ethereum from the intensive energy-consuming PoW model to the PoS model. Both mechanisms are used to confirm transactions and add new blocks to the chain, but they work differently.

The PoW system works like a competitive numeric guessing game and the first person to solve the puzzle is awarded a fixed amount of cryptocurrency. 

It requires a global network of computers to run at the same time when a transaction takes place and therefore a lot of energy.

In the PoS system, you do not need the energy-consuming hardware as you acquire coins, which are put up as collateral in the staking process and there is then a random selection through the software.

How powerful your machine is does not increase your chance