The Merge is the culmination of work by hundreds of people spanning many years and many different domains of knowledge. It began when Vitalik talked about Ethereum becoming a PoS network very early on (late 2013/early 2014). After a long while in the research phase, development started in 2018 and accelerated in 2019 and 2020 towards what would come to be known as the ‘Beacon Chain’. Then, on December 1st 2020, the Beacon Chain went live and has since accumulated over 400,000 validators that are staking over 13 million ETH. After the launch of the Beacon Chain, all attention shifted to ‘merging’ the two Ethereum chains and this would keep the core developers and researchers busy over 2021 and 2022 with many devnets, testnets and shadow forks. That, of course, brings us to today where Ethereum is finally a full Proof of Stake chain.

The Merge is the culmination of work by hundreds of people spanning many years and many different domains of knowledge. It began when Vitalik talked about Ethereum becoming a PoS network very early on (late 2013/early 2014). After a long while in the research phase, development started in 2018 and accelerated in 2019 and 2020 towards what would come to be known as the ‘Beacon Chain’. Then, on December 1st 2020, the Beacon Chain went live and has since accumulated over 400,000 validators that are staking over 13 million ETH. After the launch of the Beacon Chain, all attention shifted to ‘merging’ the two Ethereum chains and this would keep the core developers and researchers busy over 2021 and 2022 with many devnets, testnets and shadow forks. That, of course, brings us to today where Ethereum is finally a full Proof of Stake chain.