74% of Ethereum nodes ‘Merge ready’ ahead of Bellatrix upgrade

• Michael Willson
• September 12, 2022

According to Ethernodes, 73.5% of Ethereum nodes are ready for ‘Merger’ in advance of the planned Bellatrix upgrade. One of the final requirements before the Merge, is to switch Ethereum to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum node operators must update their consensus layer clients before epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain, which is slated to occur at 11:34:47 UTC on September 6, 2022, in order to be Merge ready.

However, as per the upgrade, there are 26.5% nodes that are not ready for the merger. Co-founders Vitalik Butlerin and Tim Beiko took this to twitter in order to push the not ready nodes towards the merge. The intention was to update the status of the merger.

Bellatrix is tomorrow 📆 Last chance to upgrade your node if you haven’t yet!

We’re mergiiiing 🐼 https://t.co/0VQ9zb6wjN

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🐼 (@TimBeiko) September 5, 2022

The merge is still expected to happen around Sep 13-15. What's happening today is the Bellatrix hard fork, which *prepares* the chain for the merge. Still important though – make sure to update your clients!

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 6, 2022

Node operators that will fall behind the upgrade before the hard fork will end up “sync to the pre-fork blockchain,” according to the Ethereum Foundation.

Most “Not-Ready” nodes are on the geth client and haven’t been upgraded to Geth v1.10.23 or higher, according to Ethernodes.

Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind are more Ethereum clients with node operators that need to be updated.

Block validation is a requirement for Ethereum nodes, which can be operated by several Ethereum client programs with diverse code bases and programming languages.

All of my validators are merge ready 🐼

— sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 (@sassal0x) September 6, 2022

A Beacon Chain validator is responsible for creating the following block after the execution layer has completed this TTD. This completion will signify Ethereum’s switch to the proof-of-stake algorithm.

Kindly note that Ethereum users will not have to do anything during or after the merger, according to the Ethereum Foundation. However, keep an eye out for the frauds that promise otherwise.

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