The Ethereum difficulty bomb has been postponed, but network continues

The Ethereum difficulty bomb has been postponed, 

but network use continues to rise.

The difficulty bomb is intended to reduce mining profitability in order to dissuade miners from participating in the long-awaited Merge.

Ethereum network developers have opted to postpone the difficulty bomb, a crucial step toward the layer-1 blockchain's much-anticipated Merge update.

According to core engineer Tim Beiko, they chose a two-month delay to "ensure that we sanity verify all the data before determining an exact delay and deployment period."

As the network transitions from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS), the difficulty bomb will be used to disincentivize ETH mining operations from keeping their physical mining devices operational (PoS).

It makes it far more difficult for miners to validate network transactions, lowering the profitability of PoW miners. Physical miners will eventually lose the ability to validate a block. The difficulty bomb is a network feature that was added to the code in 2016 as the Merge was transitioning to the Consensus Layer (previously known as ETH 2.0).

According to some estimations, switching to PoS will lower the Ethereum network's energy consumption by up to 99.9%. In comparison to other PoW networks, other PoS networks such as Polygon and Fantom Opera have very low power consumption.

Although Beiko makes no mention of it, delaying the difficulty bomb could cause further delays in the Merge, which is scheduled for August 2022.

On June 9, the Ropsten testnet on Ethereum conducted its own successful PoS merging, which engineers described as a "dress rehearsal" for the real merge.

Ethereum adoption is still on the rise.

Despite the current bearish sentiments in the cryptocurrency markets, Ethereum's user base is still large. Since December 2020, daily transactions on the network have remained above one million with the exception of one day. Measuring daily transactions provides a quick and easy snapshot of the network's overall load.

Every month, the number of unique addresses continues to rise. Since December 2017, when the number of new unique wallets peaked, there has been no slowdown. Since December 7, 2017, there have been a 14.5-fold rise in the number of unique wallets on Ethereum.

The price of ETH has dropped 7.5% in the last 24 hours, along with the price of most other cryptocurrencies, to $1,327, according to CoinGabbar .