Ethereum’s Arrow Glacier upgrade delays Difficulty Bomb until June 2022

Ethereum is set to undergo a scheduled upgrade at block number 13,773,000, which should take place around December 8th.

The Arrow Glacier network upgrade will delay the difficulty bomb until June 2022, which is when developers believe Ethereum will be running on Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Arrow Glacier will give miners time to breathe as Ethereum transitions to POS

According to Tim Beiko, the chair of all core developers at the Ethereum Foundation, pushing back the Ice Age/Difficulty bomb has also been done in the Byzantium, Constantinople, and London network upgrades.

🏹🏔 Arrow Glacier is coming 🏔🏹

The upgrade will go live on block 13,773,000, around December 8th. Only change is pushing back the difficulty bomb… hopefully for the last time 🤞🏻

Upgrade your nodes 😁https://t.co/wswJHDscb3

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🍵 (@TimBeiko) November 10, 2021

The EIP-4345 Difficulty Bomb was scheduled to go off in December 2021 and exponentially raise the difficulty level for miners on the network. However, as the difficulty bomb only affects Proof-of-Work networks, it was decided to delay the bomb on the mainnet and run the Proof-of-Stake transition on the Ropsten test network.

No other changes other than EIP-4345 have been included in the upgrade. The change will delay the difficulty bomb until June 2022, when developers hope the current Ethereum mainnet will merge with the Beacon Chain marking the end of Proof-of-Work Ethereum.

However, if “the merge” isn’t ready by June 2022, EIP-4345 will be delayed further.

In order to be compatible with the Arrow Glacier upgrade, node operators will need to update the client version they run to the latest versions listed in the blog post. Ethereum users with centralized exchanges and web wallet services aren’t required to make any changes ahead of the upgrade but might need to take some additional steps in the future if their service provider requires them to.

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