according toaccording toEthereum Foundation

According to the official announcement, the Ethereum mainnet (ETH1) will undergo a Gray Glacier hard fork upgrade at the end of June. This is also the twelfth hard fork upgrade in the history of Ethereum.15050000It will be held at about 18:00 on June 30th, Beijing time.

image descriptionhttps://etherscan.io/block/countdown/15050000）

(upgrade countdown:In order to cope with the upcoming upgrade, node operators or miners must download the latest version of the Ethereum client, otherwise they will be left on the old chain and cannot perform subsequent operations on the chain;

As an Ethereum user (ETH holder), if your assets are in an exchange, web wallet, mobile wallet service, or hardware wallet, you do not need to take any action unless the exchange or wallet service notifies you to take additional steps.

At present, multiple platforms such as FTX, Binance, and OKCoin have issued announcements to remind users to complete ERC20 token transfers and other operations before the upgrade, and will suspend deposits and withdrawals on the 29th until the mainnet upgrade is completed. According to past practice, at most one hour after the upgrade, when the network becomes stable, the exchange will open deposits and withdrawals.

Since the birth of Ethereum, the difficulty bomb has been written into the genetic sequence. The difficulty bomb is a set of codes added to the Ethereum mainnet blockchain. Once it explodes, the difficulty of Ethereum mining will increase exponentially, forcing miners to stop mining, and the entire network will eventually switch from POW to POS.

In past hard fork upgrades, delaying the difficulty bomb is also one of the common proposals. In the "London Upgrade" in August last year, considering the possible merger of ETH1 and ETH2 at the end of the year, the difficulty bomb was postponed to December of that year; but the actual progress of the merger was far lower than expected, so the Arrow Glacier hard fork was carried out again in December upgrade, which postponed the difficulty bomb again until June of this year.

The Gray Glacier upgrade this time postponed the difficulty bomb until September, which is also related to the Ethereum merger (ETH1 & ETH 2) process. At present, the merger process is only carried out on the test network, and only the Ropsten test network (June 9th) has been completed. The real main network merger will not begin until the remaining two test networks (Goerli and Sepolia) transition to POS.

According to the prediction of V God, the founder of Ethereum, if all goes well, the merger may be carried out as early as August; if other circumstances arise, it may be postponed to September or October. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko said that Ethereum is expected to merge between late August and November, and only catastrophic events or failures can stop this year's merger; date.