Chris Anatalio, a software engineer and platform advocate for ConsenSys, told the CoinMarketRecap podcast that — for everyday holders — "no news is good news."
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The Merge — Ethereum's long-awaited switch to a Proof-of-Stake blockchain — is just around the corner.
And inevitably, there are questions about what ETH investors should expect on the big day.
A number of exchanges have confirmed that they will temporarily suspend deposits and withdrawals while the upgrade takes place. However, transfers will resume as soon as the network is proven to be stable.
Chris Anatalio, a software engineer and platform advocate for ConsenSys, told the CoinMarketRecap podcast that — for everyday holders — "no news is good news."
"If it's uneventful, if you don't hear anything, then that's really great news. All of the changes to the actual network should not really affect everyday holders of ETH."
Anyone who is staking on centralized exchanges shouldn't need to take action either, as the likes of Coinbase will handle all of the technical details on your behalf.
But if you're running your own node, Anatalio says updates will be needed to ensure that you receive staking rewards.
Looking ahead, he believes that the rate of Ethereum issuance — the number of new coins entering circulation — is going to fall substantially.
"To put it in specific terms, right now, issuance is around 4%. It's a little bit higher than that. But at post-surge, it's going to drop down to 0.4%. In other words, inflation is going to drop by 90%. I'm not going to speculate on price, but less supply generally equals more upward upwards price pressure. Don't quote me on that, but it's definitely going to move towards Ethereum being what people refer to as a sound currency."
Could It All Go Wrong?
Anatalio conceded that The Merge is an "extremely major change" — especially considering that the Ethereum blockchain hasn't had downtime to execute this upgrade.
He likened the process to "changing the wheels of the bus while it's moving" — and because of this, he stressed multiple dress rehearsals have taken place to ensure the arrival of PoS happens without a hitch.
Bankless co-founder David Hoffman explained that the Ethereum blockchain is "an agreement between all the Ethereum clients as to what the state of Ethereum is."
As a result, one risk concerning the upgrade concerns client diversity — as this means that, if a bug happens in one client, it won't permeate through all of Ethereum.
Hoffman said Prysm is currently being used by 43% of nodes — and said he would much prefer for this number to be below 30%.
"That just means if there's a bug in Ethereum post-Merge in Prysm, 40% of nodes have that bug. Now the nature of that bug could be something very, very trivial to something very, very systemic. It's also a matter of what this bug actually is."
He said the prospect of a bug affecting all Ethereum clients is "extremely unlikely."
