The upcoming Ethereum merge is the triple halvening event. The issuance of Ether (ETH) will decrease significantly. There's also good news on the proposed switch from Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Stake (POS). In fact, the testnet report achieved significant milestones, ahead of the Altair hard fork expected on Oct 27. Currently, the Eth 1 and the Eth2 blockchains operate independently and can't communicate with each other.

This will change after the Ethereum merges event, expected by the end of this year or by early 2022 as noted in the "Charting The Path To Proof of Stake Ethereum" blog post on June 03. The Ethereum merge event will also cause the largest smart contracts platform by market capitalization to go green, reducing its power consumption levels by 99%, and is likely to be a major rallying point for environmental protection-conscious investors.

The Ethereum merge will require the current Eth1 execution clients like Geth, OpenEthereum, Hyperledger Besu, and Nethermind to work in conjunction with their Eth2 consensus counterparts or validator clients like Teku, Lighthouse, Nimbus, and Prysm. At this point, the Proof of Work (POW) consensus mechanism will cease to exist and there will only be "one" Proof of Stake (POS) blockchain.

Altair hard fork is a major milestone on the way to the Ethereum merge and it was confirmed in a recent blog post titled Finalized no. 29 the Ethereum consensus-layer by Danny Ryan on Sept 28. Basically, the Altair hard fork would take place on epoch 74240 on Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). It would be the first mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chain.

According to the blog post related to the Altair hard fork or the prelude to the Ethereum merge: this upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive params as per EIP-2982. The initial interoperability between multiple clients is being tested to see if they can operate with each other.

The Ethereum merge interoperability specifications were released earlier, providing the early blueprints of how the transition would take shape. This allows for early testing and devnets to validate different features of interoperability. The Ethereum developers are reporting that merge specifications are near feature complete and the core logic is stable. Now, the merge logic will be built and teams will test their software with other teams on developer nets, this allows for specification testing and finding/fixing issues.

On Oct 05, the Ethereum 2.0 team also released new client versions for beacon node operators to upgrade and prepare themselves for the Altair hard fork - accelerating the Ethereum merge, named after the twelfth brightest star in the night sky. All validators must upgrade to continue operation on the Beacon Chain and not doing so will attract downtime penalties. The rewards for the bug bounty are also being enhanced to offer up to double the previous amounts, from now and until four weeks after the launch.

Ethereum 2.0 is the next big upgrade for the Ethereum network.. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM, and sharding. Also, it will reduce the resources required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.

The Eth2 upgrade will start in three phases. The first Phase 0 Beacon Chain launched on Dec 01 ’20 and introduced the staking feature. Then, the Ethereum merge will happen followed by Phase 1 in Q1 2021, which will introduce sharding and allow data storage on shards, however, transactions can’t still be processed.

Phase 2 will make the Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational. This will happen after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Only after the ETH2 chain has been rolled out, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence. The Eth1 and Eth2 chains will gradually merge with each other, known as the Ethereum merge.

The implementation of Ethereum's upgrade proposal, EIP-1559 could go live on August 4.

Ethereum, the most popular blockchain, introduces the EIP-1559 update. This proposal exists to enhance the way transactions are processed and improve the user´s experience. It has the potential to be one of the most important updates in the history of Ethereum.

Ethereum offers open access to digital money and virtual services for everyone, regardless of the origin or location. It is a technology built by the community behind Ether (Ethereum's native cryptocurrency) and many more applications.

Ethereum works on the basis of a blockchain network. A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions, where all transactions are verified and recorded. The ledger is the record of all operations and transactions that are carried out within the blockchain. This ledger plays a very important role in the transparency, security, and privacy of blockchain technology.

EIP-1559 is a proposal to update transaction fees on Ethereum and partakes a larger update called London.

London will implement a number of major Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) to prepare for the Serenity (ETH 2.0) update scheduled for 2022. It will also follow another update called Berlin that took place in April 2021 and is already active in Ethereum's mainnet. London is already active on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet, and kicked off on June 24, 2021. 

Ropsten Ethereum, also known as “Ethereum Testnet”, is a testnet that has the same protocol as Ethereum, but it serves to carry out tests before implementing them in the main network.

London includes five code changes, or "Ethereum Improvements Proposals" (EIP). One of them is EIP-1559, which introduces various changes in transaction fees, thereby changing the behavior of customers in various areas, such as mining.

• EIP-1559: Fee Market Change for ETH 1.0 Chain
• EIP-3198: BASEFEE opcode
• EIP-3529: Reduction in refunds
• EIP-3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte
• EIP-3554: Difficulty Bomb Delay to December 1st, 2021

This proposal seeks to divide transaction fees on Ethereum into base fees and tips.

With the rise in popularity of Ethereum, ETH gas fees (transaction fees that users pay to miners in a blockchain protocol for their transaction to go through) have become more complex and users often run into delays in the confirmation of transactions. Ethereum Enhancement Proposal EIP-1559 offers a solution to these issues by updating how transactions work on Ethereum.

EIP-1559 proposes that users pay an algorithmically adjusted base fee for each transaction, along with the option to include a tip to speed them up. It will adjust rates so that the lowest bid for the block is what users are charged. The rates will fluctuate according to the momentary demand of the network. If there is a lot of congestion, the rates will increase.

This update changes the reward system for miners. Crypto miners are currently receiving the newly-created Ether and the commissions of the transactions that users pay. But after EIP-1559, although they will continue to charge commissions, the miners will receive less for validating the transactions. For this reason, miners are currently indecisive about what this update will bring.

ETH Base Fees. The protocol is replaced by a mandatory and algorithmically determined fee called a base fee. This base rate will charge Ethers and will fluctuate based on network congestion.

ETH Tips. If you want faster transaction processing, EIP-1559 allows you to add a tip in addition to the base fee. These tips go directly to miners to encourage them to prioritize transactions that include tips. If there is no increase in demand when a user initiates a transaction, even a small tip would be enough to guarantee that the transaction will be included in the following blocks. Non-urgent transactions will happen when the base rate decreases. Ethereum will use a simple auction system to determine which transactions to include in a block. The more you offer to pay, the more likely a miner will include your transaction in an upcoming block.

This proposal has garnered the most support from Ethereum app creators and users up to now, given the current difficulty of selecting a correct transaction fee. 

EIP 1559 has taken slightly longer than expected to be released to the mainnet. In the beginning, its launch was expected in mid-July, but if there are no setbacks, it seems that it will start working on August 4. This is because time is required to intensively test the implementation of EIP-1559. Developers will verify that there are no problems or deficiencies in the code to ensure a smooth deployment. This is necessary as the update previously contained a fault that temporarily prevented 12% of computers from synchronizing with the network.