Ethereum has completed its second hard fork in less than 30 days.
With the mining of block 9,200,000, the Muir Glacier upgrade has been implemented on the network. The block was mined today at 8:30 UTC.
As of press time, 92 percent of ethereum clients were synced with the new upgrade, according to Ethernodes.
First proposed by EthHub’s Eric Conner in November as Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 2384, Muir Glacier delays the “difficulty bomb” by 4 million blocks. With the delay, the difficulty bomb is expected to not “go off” again for a few years, at least until the deployment of key Eth 2.0 features such as the finality gadget.
A purposeful design since ethereum’s launch in 2015, the difficulty bomb slowly increases block time settlement so as to push the network toward proof-of-stake (PoS).
If Muir Glacier was not implemented, the cost of transactions on the current ethereum network would skyrocket as block settlement times are projected to hit 20–30 seconds per block. As fewer blocks are minted every day, the cost of fitting transactions into blocks increases, Conner said.
