Next Wednesday, June 29, the Ethereum network will undergo a planned upgrade called “Gray Glacier” on block 15,050,000, which is intended to extend the ”Ice Age/Difficulty Bomb” by 700,000 blocks, equivalent to 100 days, starting next Wednesday.
Difficulty Bomb is being done to remove incentives for miners to stop mining on the current network, Ethereum 1.0, after the expected successful transition to Ethereum 2.0.
Tim Beiko, a key developer at Ethereum, said that this will be the last extension to Difficulty Bomb, implying that Ethereum 2.0 is a few months away from release.
No action is required from an Ethereum user or holder unless such instructions are given by exchange or wallet service providers. To be compatible with the Gray Glacier upgrade, node operators must update the client version they are using.
Miners or node operators not participating in the upgrade will be stuck in a non-compliant chain following the old rules. As a result, they will not be able to send ETH or operate on the Ethereum network after the upgrade.
They are not worried despite the bugs in the previous test
Meanwhile, at the 551st meeting among the key Ethereum developers, the details related to the merge test were discussed with a brief description of how the 7th mainnet shadow fork went wrong. During this test 20% of nodes went down immediately when the merge was activated, with even more nodes going down afterwards.
Despite the shadow fork result, the developers are confident and plan to run the merge on their second major test network, the Sepolia, around Wednesday, July 6, following the 4th of July weekend in the US.
