At 2:43 AM Eastern Time at block 15537393, Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work era came to an end, ushering in a new age of Proof-of-Stake Ethereum. With no downtime and in the course of just 12 seconds, Ethereum block production successfully transitioned from a globally-distributed group of miners running specialized hardware to a globally-distributed group of validators staking ETH. CM Research was awake and excited to witness this ambitious feat of upgrading a network securing many billions in value. In this special update, we share what we saw on the ground at the time of The Merge. The first step of The Merge, the ... (full story)