The developer of Ethereum says that the integration can be shipped in August

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Preston Van Loon told unauthorized conference attendees that an Ethereum merger could happen as soon as August. Van Loon says he's keen to see integration happen before the network's difficult bombshell goes off. Ethereum developers announced Ropsten testnet integration for Jun. 8 Scheduled.

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The Ethereum Foundation's Preston Van Loon, Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin have given new estimates for the network's “merger” to the proof-of-concept, indicating that it could take place in August.

Ethereum integration may begin in August.

According to several members of the Ethereum Foundation, the “merger” is less than three months away from proof-of-stake.

Speaking at an unofficial conference Thursday, Ethereum core developer Preston Van Loon told attendees that the network's transition to proof-of-stake was tentatively scheduled for August.

“As we know so far, if everything goes to plan, August – it just makes sense,” Van Loon said in a conversation with Ethereum researcher Justin Drake and Fiment CEO Lorin Gabel. Benjamin Cohen shared a clip of the conversation on Twitter Thursday.

Ethereum core dev @preston_vanloon just said that the Ethereum integration is ready, they are just testing it now, and they expect the integration to be in August. Sealed Room @ Unlicensed are very excited about it. Great question @TrustlessState. Also on the panel @drakefjustin pic.twitter.com/vX4beNatJ5

— Benjamin Cohen (@benjicohen.eth) (@benjicohen421) May 19, 2022

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation crypto researcher Justin Drake gave similar estimates regarding the merger date. However, Buterin, who recently spoke at the ETH Shanghai meeting, was more conservative in his final estimate, which said that the merger could take place in September or October.

In April, Ethereum Foundation's Tim Beiko said the merger would not happen past June 2022. However, Van Loon noted that there was “strong interest” in Ethereum's development community for the merger to happen before the network's hard bomb went off in August.

The developers of Ethereum created the difficult bomb in 2016 to ensure that network participants moved to the new chain of proof after the merger. Once the hard bomb is activated, mining on the network will slowly take away computing power until it becomes impossible.

Due to the integration delays, Ethereum developers had to repeatedly develop the problem bomb until it was ready to move to Proof-of-Stake to keep the network operational. If the Ethereum developers are ready to go through with the integration in August, they won't need to push the problem bomb again, resulting in a much cleaner transition.

Before the integration, developers run a test integration on the Ropsten Ethereum testnet. A Github pull request earlier this week confirmed that Ropston's testnet integration will take place around June 8, indicating that preparations for the mainnet integration are complete. Ethereum has successfully completed many integration tests.

Ethereum integration is the most anticipated update that combines the current consensus layer with the new verification beacon chain. The merger will move Ethereum from an energy-based proof-of-work system to proof-of-stake and reduce the supply of ETH by 90 percent.

Disclosure: At the time of writing this piece, the author owns ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.

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