Ethereum’s Arrow glacier upgrade to enable 100% transition to PoS model

Ethereum network’s recent Arrow Glacier upgrade will mimic the earlier launched Muir Glacier upgrade. The upgrade will be implemented at the Ethereum block height 13,773,000. Muir upgrade took place at block number 9,200,000 in January 2020. Muir Glacier delayed the difficulty bomb for another 4,000,000 blocks or 611 days.
Difficulty Bomb refers to one piece of difficulty retargeting mechanism that is built into Ethereum’s Proof of Work (PoW) model.It delays the overall performance of Ethereum network in the following ways:
* The difficulty bomb adds separately to the difficulty and at every 100,000 blocks it increases the value of how much it adds.
* Initially, the amount is so small there is no visible effect on block times, and it increases gradually for a very long time up to a point where the increment becomes exponential.
* Difficulty bomb is called Ice age for this initial slow build-up and then sudden freezing.
* It causes an increase in block times for the network.
- This leads to a degradation in the usability of Ethereum due to waiting for confirmation of transactions and * Dapps as everything takes longer throughout the network.
* The Difficulty Bomb affects only PoW networks, and hence exists only on the Ethereum mainnet and the Ropsten test network.
* Ropsten test network allows for blockchain development testing before deployment on Ethereum mainnet.
* The bomb has been on the network since 2015.
* It increases the network’s mining difficulty over time.
* At last this would result in the Ice Age, when the blockchain would stop PoW block production and become 100 percent reliant on proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus.
The Arrow glacier upgrade aims mainly to address the following issues being caused due to difficulty bomb delay:
* It will change the parameters of the network’s Difficulty Bomb, pushing it several months back as Muir glacier.
* The new upgrade will postpone Ethereum’s Ice Age or push the difficulty bomb delay up to June 2022.
- This will provide the Ethereum network another six months until it shifts completely to the Ice Age proof-of-stake (PoS) transition.
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