According to the network’s key developers, including Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation, the Gray Glacier hard fork, which delayed the difficulty explosion, went live on Ethereum on Thursday without a hitch. The Sepolia testnet, the second-to-last testnet to go through the experiment before the actual Merge, is also scheduled to run through its Merge trial during the coming days. Etherscan reports that at about 6:54 am ET on June 30 started, the Gray Glacier hard fork block 15,050,000. As a result of the hard fork, the difficulty bomb will now be postponed by around 700,000 blocks, or 100 days, giving developers till mid-October to finish the much-anticipated Merge. Tim Beiko, community manager for the Ethereum Foundation, immediately went to tweet later that day that at 20 blocks after the fork, all monitored notes were still in sync. He stated: “20 blocks past the fork, and it’s looking good: all monitored nodes except @OpenEthereumOrg, which doesn’t support the fork, are in sync. No blocks on the old chain so far!” On Twitter, Ethereum ecosystem developer Nethermind affirmed the hard fork’s completion and added that it had successfully delayed the difficulty of the bomb. 🧊Gray Glacier hard fork is successful 🧊 Nethermind nodes are fine. Block time will go back down to 13 seconds. Difficulty bomb delayed 🙌 pic.twitter.com/NPkZMYhWHn — Nethermind (@nethermindeth) June 30, 2022 A difficulty bomb is a tool used to graduall...
