The long-awaited Ethereum Merge was kicked off early Tuesday by initiating the Bellatrix upgrade.
Some technical problems had people questioning why there was over an almost one in ten missed block rate across the last 600 slots.
However, the Bellatrix upgrade was successful, and Ethereum developers declared that they were ready for the final execution stage of the Merge called Paris.
Vitalik Buterin said last that it is scheduled to take place “around” September 13 to 15.
The Bellatrix upgrade updated the Ethereum consensus layer clients at epoch 144896 on the beacon chain to keep them ready for the Merge next week.
During the upgrade, 5% of validators were offline, contributing to a 9% missed block rate. This led to observers questioning the readiness of the Ethereum network for the switch to proof of stake.
The Ethereum Foundation has asked all its node operators to update their clients to the latest (merge-ready software) in the run-up to the Merge’s final execution.
Node operators are in charge of keeping the backend and infrastructure of the network.
Any operator who fails to do so before next week will “be stuck on an old chain following old rules and will be unable to send Ether or operate on the post-merge Ethereum network.”
The Merge is an upgrade that will combine the Ethereum beacon chain and its mainnet. It will be the end of the energy-intensive method of validating transactions proof-of-work to an energy-efficient proof-of-stake method.
