Ethereum 2.0 “Arrow Glacier” Upgrade To Fall On Dec 08

Ethereum difficulty bomb adjusting Arrow Glacier hard fork will fall on Dec 08 at block 13,773,000, according to an Ethereum Foundation blog post released recently. The Altair hard fork was recently deployed on Oct 27 – the first mainnet upgrade to the Eth2 beacon chain for testing client interoperability extensively and Arrow Glacier will further pave the way for the Ethereum 2.0 Merge event, which will mark the end of the Proof of Work (POW) and will combine both Eth1 and Eth 2 (Beacon Chain) into one.

It will only affect the Ethereum mainnet and Ropsten test net, hence it isn’t applicable for the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain running Proof of Stake (POS). The same will be executed on the Beacon Chain after the Merge has been tested on the Ropsten test net later. This is the last major upgrade before the Merge event expected in the first quarter of the next year 2022 and core developers are confident that Merge would have been attained by then.

The Arrow Glacier upgrade only includes one Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4345, which delays the difficulty bomb or pushes the ice age by 10,700,000 blocks to June 2022. The difficulty bomb or the ice age mechanism was added to the protocol to ensure that the Proof of Work (POW) will be brought to an end and there won’t be any option for continuing it.

About Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0 is the next big upgrade for the Ethereum network.. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM, and sharding. Also, it will reduce the resources required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.

The Eth2 upgrade will start in three phases. The first Phase 0 Beacon Chain launched on Dec 01 20 and introduced the staking feature. Next, the Ethereum merge will happen followed by Phase 1 in Q1 2021, which will introduce sharding and allow data storage on shards, however, transactions cant still be processed.

Phase 2 will make the Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational. This will happen after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Only after the ETH2 chain has been rolled out, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence.


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