Ethereum’s Massive Upgrade Won’t Boost Speeds or Lower Transaction Fees, Cautions Crypto Asset’s Main Backer

The main backers of Ethereum (ETH) are debunking misconceptions about how the upcoming Merge will affect the leading altcoin’s performance.

According to an article on the Ethereum Foundation’s website, the top smart contract platform’s transition to a proof-of-stake mechanism from a proof-of-work one won’t reduce its transaction fees or boost its speed.

The Ethereum Foundation says that gas fees won’t be lower as The Merge isn’t an expansion of ETH’s network capacity.

“The Merge is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees.

Gas fees are a product of network demand relative to the capacity of the network. The Merge deprecates the use of proof-of-work, transitioning to proof-of-stake for consensus, but does not significantly change any parameters that directly influence network capacity or throughput.”

The Foundation also says that while the speed of the network will slightly improve, it will do so in a way that is unnoticeable to users.

“A transaction’s ‘speed’ can be measured in a few ways, including time to be included in a block and time to finalization. Both of these changes slightly, but not in a way that users will notice.

Historically, on proof-of-work, the target was to have a new block every ~13.3 seconds. On the Beacon Chain, slots occur precisely every 12 seconds, each of which is an opportunity for a validator to publish a block.

Most slots have blocks, but not necessarily all (i.e. a validator is offline). On proof-of-stake blocks will be produced  about 10% more frequently than on proof-of-work. This is a fairly insignificant change and is unlikely to be noticed by users.”

Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake system is slated for launch mid September.

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