Ethereum team has been working hard to make ETH 2.0 vision realistic, but things are a bit delayed, and may take mid of 2022 to get it rolled out fully. In order to compensate for the delay and to migrate to proof-of-stake from proof-of-working mining, Ethereum has come up with an Arrow Glacier network upgrade on Dec. 8, 2021, which will help them in meeting the objective of difficulty bomb till June 2022.
So what is this new Glacier update all about and what is this controversial Difficulty bomb, is what we will explore today.
What Is An Arrow Glacier Network Upgrade?
Official Ethereum blog mentions :
That, the Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 13,773,000, which is predicted to occur on Wednesday, December 8, 2021. The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and time zones. Please upgrade your node before Sunday, December 5, 2021 to account for the variable block times.
Let’s understand the significance of this announcement.
This upgrade is the third one in this year 2021, after the recent
- Altair, Upgrade to the Beacon Chain which happened on October 27.
- Muir Glacier Upgrade that happened in Jan 2021
- And Famous London hard Fork which happened in Aug 2021, where to introduce the deflationary EIP-1559 protocol
This latest Arrow Glacier network upgrades like Muir Glacier will modify the parameters of the Ice Age/Difficulty Bomb, thereby pushing it back several months. This change will be done in the Byzantium, Constantinople, and London network upgrades. No other changes are introduced as part of Arrow Glacier.
The idea here is to push the difficulty bomb until summer next year to keep the chain safe from freezing a.k.a the “ice age”.
To further understand the utility of this delay infusion, we need to understand the concept behind the difficulty bomb.
What is a Difficulty Bomb?
The difficulty bomb is nothing but a set of codes added to the Ethereum main blockchain to exponentially raise the difficulty level, in terms of mining, which will make it difficult for miners to keep up with the increased difficulty. The idea is to increase the Block time that will eventually lead to a freezing of the blockchain.
Difficulty bomb is a very “steep” exponential curve; it is flat for a very long time, and then kicks in very quickly when the bomb “explodes”.
This bomb is meant to impact only Proof of Work networks, and hence only exists on the Ethereum MainNet and the Ropsten test network.
Why difficulty bomb was introduced in the first place?
This idea to introduce the difficulty in the Ethereum Proof-of-work main chain was thoughts in order to facilitate the transition to proof of stake over the period of time, it further added an extra attribute to force the existing miners to upgrade their nodes.
The core objective therefore is to make it difficult for existing miners to stay on old proof-of-work chains
EIP 4345:
The current arrow glacier upgrade further is utilizing a difficulty bomb that is represented as EIP-4345:
What Is EIP 4345?
It Delays the difficulty bomb to be noticeable in June 2022. This EIP is proposed to push the difficulty bomb 10,700,000 blocks later than the actual block number. Most likely, it will be activated on the Ethereum mainnet by December 8th, 2021.
Summing Difficulty Bomb and Arrow’s Glacier Upgrade:
This upgrade is meant to facilitate ETH miners to plan their migration to new proof-of-stake chains, while the current ETH network moves to ETH 2.0. Ethereum is being seriously challenged by existing layer 1 and layer blockchain platforms like Polygon, Solana, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain who are way better in terms of speed and scalability and are swiftly catching up in terms of the user base.
The more ETH 2.0 journey is delayed the more difficult it is becoming for Ethereum to hold on to their existing supremacy. Let’s hope that by mid of 2022 Ethereum completely moves to Proof-of-stake enabled network and becomes more GAS fee efficient, more secure and more lucrative to developers and investors who are betting big on ETH 2.0 vision.
