OpenEthereum Support Has Finally Ended

OpenEthereum, one of the most popular, fastest, and feature-rich Ethereum (ETH) clients, has ceased support for its software in order to prepare itself for the upcoming transition. The company creates “clients” or platforms used to connect to the Ethereum network, thereby enabling individuals (who are a part of the network) to create an Ethereum node to mine the token. Currently, Ethereum uses the non-environmental friendly proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

The team at OpenEthereum took to Twitter to state that they’ve taken the decision to end support for the software because of the Merge approaching and the legacy codebase getting “extremely hard to manage” due to its age.

Previously, the crypto project was owned and managed by blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies before it transferred its ownership to the OpenEthereum decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) back in December 2019.

During that time, Parity reported that they wanted to guarantee the codebase is “well-managed and runs for as long as the crypto community finds it beneficial.” On the other hand, the team at OpenEthereum said that “well documented” clients were needed to “explore the upcoming transition and seamless move to proof-of-stake (PoS),” asking users to move on to other providers such as Erigon or Nethermind.

What to Expect at the Merge?

The Merge is nothing but Ethereum’s highly complex and long-awaited shift from the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The PoW mechanism is the less environmentally friendly protocol while the PoS mechanism is the much more eco-friendly protocol that Ethereum aims to deploy. The Merge has seen continuous delays since it was first proposed back in 2016. Initially, it was decided to be deployed in 2019 but now it’s believed that the Merge would finally happen sometime in August. Once the transition occurs, it will be known as the “Consensus Layer.”

The three members working actively on the Merge are Sajida Zouarhi (Product Manager at Hyperledger Besu), Mikhail Kalinin (Researcher at ConsenSys R&D), Ben Edington (Product Manager at Teku), according to ConsenSys.

Earlier at the Permissionless conference, core Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon told the attendees that the company plans to make the Merge happen sometime in August “if everything goes as per the plan.” Additionally, he stated that Ethereum is looking forward to making this deployment before the network suffers any collapse, considering it is one of the world’s largest and heavily trafficked cryptocurrency exchanges. Supporting Van loon’s statement, researcher Justin Drake said that ensuring the Merge happens would be the topmost priority of the company.

In any case, the company expects the Ropsten transition to take place before the Merge. Ropsten is one of Ethereum’s key test networks and if this transition happens smoothly, the Ethereum network will soon move to the PoS consensus mechanism.

If the Merge finally happens in August, the ultimate goal for Ethereum is to get a big update in its network early next year. Until then, Ethereum will continue to use layer-2 networks like Optimism and Polygon to handle its high exchange volumes and bring more stability to its network.

Meanwhile, users and developers of Ethereum should expect to see two significant changes regarding the upcoming Merge. They should notice the first change happening in the method for beacon randomness, which helps run applications smoothly. The second change should be the reduction in block times from 13 seconds per block to 12 seconds per block.