What the Ethereum Merge means for the blockchain’s layer-2 solutions

cointelegraph.com:

Ethereum is just over a week away from officially moving to a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain with the Merge slated for completion around Sept. 13–15. With the transition, Ethereum would abandon its current proof-of-work (PoW) chain, eliminating miners from the ecosystem. 

Ethereum is a vast ecosystem with thousands of decentralized applications and decentralized finance protocols working on top of it. Additionally, there are several layer-2 solutions, i.e., solutions built on top of the blockchain itself, the layer 1, to facilitate faster transactions and make Ethereum more scalable.

The Merge would mark the completion of the second phase of the three-phase transition process. The upcoming event will only see the official change of consensus, where the Ethereum blockchain would start processing transactions on the PoS chain. However, there won’t be much impact on scalability or gas fees.

The scalability fixes are meant to arrive after the completion of the third phase, which would introduce sharding, a form of parallel processing that Ethereum founders and developers have claimed would increase Ethereum’s transaction throughput exponentially.

Will layer-2 solutions like Polygon, Arbitrum One, Boba Network and Loopering be viable after the Merge? Cointelegraph got in touch with industry insiders for insight into how these L2 ecosystems will be impacted by the Merge.

Bitfinex chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino believes the Merge won’t have any impact on L2s as the Merge won’t solve the scalability solutions immediately. He told Cointelegraph that even after the completion of the third phase of the Ethereum transition, when it becomes monumentally scalable, L2s will still find a place in the ecosystem. He explained:

Anton