The Gray Glacier hard fork went live on Ethereum without a hitch according to the network’s core devlopers. The Sepolia testnet is also set to run through its Merge trial over the next few days and is the second last testnet to go through the trial before the official Merge.
According to Etherscan, the Gray Glacier hard fork was initiated on block number 15050000 . The hard fork will now delay the difficulty bomb by roughly 700,000 blocks or 100 days, giving devs until mid-October to complete the long-awaited Merge.
Ethereum ecosystem developer Nethermind also confirmed the success of the hard fork, adding that the difficulty bomb had been successfully delayed.The difficulty bomb is a mechanism put in place to gradually disincentivize Ether miners from Proof-of-Work mining on Ethereum ahead of the network’s eventual merge with the Proof-of-Stake (-based Beacon Chain.
This is done by increasing the difficulty level of puzzles in the PoW mining algorithm, thus resulting in longer block times and fewer ETH mining rewards. The mechanism would also make the Merge significantly more complicated for devs to complete due to its gradual slowing of block-creation.
Pushing back the difficulty bomb was required as it would have slowed down new block creation so much that it would almost be impossible to introduce new network upgrades.
