This is a significant development, because it means GPU miners are no longer responsible for verifying transactions and adding them to the blockchain.
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The Merge has been completed — with Ethereum moving from a Proof-of-Work to a Proof-of-Stake blockchain.
There were jubilant scenes in viewing parties as pandas emerged in code to show that PoS was activated.
This is a significant development, because it means GPU miners are no longer responsible for verifying transactions and adding them to the blockchain.
They're now being urged to move over to Proof-of-Stake, which promises to use 99.95% less energy and be far more environmentally friendly.
In the moments after The Merge, there was a nervous wait to see how the first "epoch" — a bundle of 32 blocks — would perform in the new environment.
Software engineers watching closely at an Ethereum Foundation viewing party said it went "amazing" and "perfectly" as few blocks were being missed.
"We've lost about 4% of validators — my honest estimate was that we could lose 10% to 20% of validators. Going down to 95% participation is incredible. There's so much headroom there."
ETH's price was initially muted as The Merge was confirmed — CoinMarketCap data shows it was stuck at about $1,600… flat on a one-hour and 24-hour timeframe.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin struck a bit more of a cautious note in the foundation's livestream:
"This is the first step in Ethereum's big journey toward being a very mature system. There's still lots of steps to go. We still have to scale, we still have to fix privacy, we have to make the thing actually secure for regular users. We have to work hard and do our part to make all of these other things happen as well. To me, The Merge just symbolizes the difference between early-stage Ethereum and the Ethereum we've always wanted. Let's go and build out all the other parts of that ecosystem."
The exact time and date of The Merge was something of a moving target because it depended on difficulty and hashrate.
It ended up happening just before 3am EST on Thursday morning, meaning that it was a late night for many American Ethereum enthusiasts.
Those who watched the Ethereum Foundation's livestream were entitled to receive a POAP — Proof of Attendance Protocol — a unique NFT that proves they were there.
Ethereum investors have been told that they don't need to take any action following on from The Merge — no new tokens are being created, and "ETH is ETH."
However, some exchanges did halt deposits and withdrawals for a brief time in the minutes following on from the transition.
The Merge was years in the making, and operating on PoS had always been in Ethereum's roadmap. But the ambitious upgrade — compared with changing a car's engine while it was traveling at high speed — was beset by delays and ended up being pushed back several years.
Buterin has previously said that Ethereum would be 55% complete once The Merge took place.
