Will there be two Ethereums after moving to PoS?

The future of Ethereum after the update

There is just over a month left until the launch of Ethereum's major update, The Merge, which will mark the transition from a Proof-of-Work consensus system to a more sustainable and less wasteful Proof-of-Stake system. This is sparking a debate in the crypto community about what implications this may have for the blockchain network.

Discussions also included the views of those who claim that Proof of Work will live on after the merger.

The update, which is scheduled to launch on September 19 next year, is expected to revolutionize the blockchain network, making it more scalable, cheaper and more accessible, but it certainly still has many question marks, such as mining, which could disappear. It was precisely to address this shortcoming that the update was planned in stages, starting in December 2020 with the launch of the Beacon Chain, which kicked off Phase 0 of the three-phase process.

Beacon Chain has started the transition to PoS, allowing users to stake their Ethereum to become validators. The upcoming merger will merge the current PoW mainnet with the Beacon Chain, transferring the entire history of Ethereum to the new chain. During a recent Paris conference, Buterin explained that the move to PoS, which increases scalability, is just one of the first in a series of upgrades.

According to him, the Ethereum blockchain will be completed in about 55 %:

Community feedback on the major update

Some argue that even after September 19th, the Proof of Stake consensus will continue to exist alongside the Proof of Work consensus, precisely to allow for a less traumatic transition.

But others argue that miners are already considering switching to parallel Ethereum with a PoW system. It is no coincidence that Ethereum Classic has seen a real price explosion in recent weeks. ETC, the hard fork of Ethereum created in 2017, will still maintain the Proof of Work system.

There is also great uncertainty about what may happen after the upgrade to the price of Ethereum, which has increased by more than 50 % in recent weeks.

In an interview, Barney Chambers, co-founder and lead co-developer of the Umbria Network cross-chain DeFi platform, said:

“Ethereum accumulation is concentrated in the hands of validators who already hold the majority of tokens. The Ethereum foundation claims that the Merge will not affect the price of Ethereum, but the merger will cause a fundamental shift in the way new tokens are distributed, which will have a dramatic effect on the price of both Ethereum and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.