Last Updated on September 7, 2022 by Bitfinsider

Early on Tuesday morning, Ethereum core engineers launched Bellatrix, the final significant improvement before the network’s long-awaited unification. However, others have questioned the network’s readiness for the update due to some early technical issues.

The network will switch from an energy-intensive proof-of-work system to a significantly more energy-efficient proof-of-stake blockchain as a result of the merge, an update that joins Ethereum’s beacon chain and mainnet. Today, the Bellatrix upgrade that starts the merging on the beacon chain’s backend, consensus layer, was successfully launched by Ethereum developers. The execution layer of the network will undergo another upgrade the following week, altering how ETH is generated and verified for all users globally.

Developers welcomed the Bellatrix upgrade’s successful execution after it went live and declared that they were moving full speed ahead with the merge’s last execution layer upgrade, Paris, which Vitalik Buterin stated on Tuesday is scheduled for “around” September 13 to September 15.

However, there were some indications that Bellatrix might not have been as popular as it was when it was initially televised.

Since Bellatrix ran this morning, the frequency with which the Ethereum network fails to validate a block of transactions scheduled for validation has increased noticeably. In other words, although ordinarily 0.5% of all blocks scheduled for validation on Ethereum fail to be validated on the first try, on Tuesday morning, more than 9% of all blocks faced that problem. This number increased by around 1,700% after Bellatrix went into effect.

All Ethereum node operators—the people and entities that maintain the network’s infrastructure and backend running—must update their clients to the most recent, merge-ready software in the lead-up to the merge’s final Paris upgrade. In fact, the operators who had not yet carried out this software upgrade were thought to be the responsible for this morning’s increase in the missed block rate.

In other words, the greater the number of node operators who have not yet upgraded their software, the greater the likelihood that the proof-of-stake chain would experience lost blocks. 25.2% of Ethereum nodes, according to Ethernodes, have not yet updated their software.

Ethereum’s core developers have been focusing on the task of persuading all node operators to upgrade their software in the lead-up to the market for months. Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden added, “I think the biggest issue that we have right now is that we need to educate the users.”

This specifically entails informing all node operators that if they fail to upgrade their software and run both consensus layer and execution layer clients prior to the merge, they will be kicked off the network.

However, it appears that the worst-case situation in this regard has already been averted. The merge wouldn’t be able to be completed by the end of next week if fewer than 66% of node operators updated their software.

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