TechCrunch
Popular cryptocurrency blockchain Ethereum has completed its long-awaited switch to proof-of-stake. That upgrade process, better known as “The Merge”, has been years in the making. According to the Ethereum Foundation, today’s transition reduces Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.95%.
Previously, the Ethereum blockchain relied on proof-of-work, a consensus mechanism that requires a lot of computational effort from all the decentralized nodes participating in the blockchain.
The proof-of-stake mechanism radically changes how the Ethereum blockchain works. It eliminates the need for mining new blocks as the network is now secured using staked ETH and validators.