On the occasion of the Ethereum (ETH) Blockchain Merger operation, several players in the ecosystem declared their support for the project. Among these are the Tether and USD blockchains, the two stablecoins most used by investors. Conversely, some denounce the abandonment of the Proof-of-Work. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Proof-of-Stake uses much less energy than Proof-of-Work and thus reduces the barriers to market entry in view of the fact that the equipment required will be less fussy and expensive.
Full Tether and USD support
Tether and USD Coin respectively manifested the Merger which is to take place in mid-September. Together, the two digital assets represent a market capitalization of $120 billion. This is an important vote of confidence for one of the most ambitious and riskiest upgrades on the market. The USDC issuer (the Circle company) has warned that it does not intend to support those advocating for the Proof-of-Work. Indeed, Circle expressed its optimism about the future scalability opportunities that such an operation would unlock as well as the reduced network energy consumption that would be one of the consequences of the Merger.
The company also clarified that it does not anticipate any disruption in the operation of USDC once the Merger is completed. Such a step will nevertheless render miners obsolete and put validators in charge of verifying future transactions.
Tether is positioned on the same doctrinal line, adding a nuance. Indeed, the company behind Tether added that to ensure there is no disruption to DeFi products or platforms, it is important that the transition is not militarized. Such an ambition would cause confusion and damage in the ecosystem. The Ethereum blockchain could also suffer collateral consequences.
Defenders of Proof-of-Work
The Ethereum Foundation says that switching to proof-of-stake has many benefits. Concretely, validators must block 32 ETH to have the right to resolve a node. In addition, actors who carry out staking could be penalized if they do not act in the interest of the network. The other argument is that of energy consumption, which will be drastically reduced. Barriers to entry will thus be reduced as sophisticated equipment is no longer required for validators. Those interested in staking can also pool their resources by organizing pools.
Against this is the risk of an increase in centralization due to the transition to Proof-of-Stake. The Fusion should also pave the way for the deployment of sharding thereby increasing Ethereum’s ability to store and access data. To this argument, the Ethereum Foundation argues that it is a necessity to guarantee the processing of a greater number of transactions per second.
The Merger is therefore not unanimous. Tron founder Justin Sun recently argued that the Proof-of-Work remains an essential element see founder of Ethereum.
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