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Ethereum’s merge involves it switching from a Proof-of-work to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This event can be considered as one of the most significant events in the crypto space.

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And of course in important events like these, speculation and misinformation always trend. 

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The decision for Ethereum developers to switch from their original consensus protocol, Proof-of-Work (PoW), to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) has been in the making for several years now.

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Beacon Chain, which is the Ethereum blockchain branch that is responsible for implementing the PoS was originally brought into existence on December 1, 2020, and has been going through developments and testing.

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The Beacon Chain will be joined together with the current EVM (Ethereum virtual machine) state of the Ethereum PoW chain.....hence the term "Merge"

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It is undebatable that the transformation from PoW to PoS will cause changes in Ethereum as a network and in many areas, such as economic, environmental, tokenomics, competition against other crypto assets, and so on..the change to PoS is a turning point for the blockchain, as well as for the entire crypto community.

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The commencement of the new PoS consensus mechanism will lead to a thorough reduction of the energy that Ethereum’s blockchain will need, dropping its energy consumption by up to 99%, which would also attract new investors.

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After the activation of the PoS mechanism, the first event that will take place will be the plummeting of Ethereum’s hash rate to zero, therefore signaling the end of an era. 

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Any user who has ETH in their possession will be able to become a validator on the new network algorithm.

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Miners who have been mining Ethereum on a day to day basis will have the choice to transition to stakers/validators or move to another PoW coin to continue their mining activities. 

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Several Ethereum mining groups have tried to spin the event by threatening to create a new Ethereum fork; their efforts so far have been in vain.

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Ethereum Classic, the original blockchain for Ethereum, will continue to operate using PoW. Vitalik (Founder of Ethereum) had already encouraged miners leaving Ethereum to switch to Ethereum classic to continue activities there.

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There are also other profitable destinations for the miners to migrate to, where mining can offer sufficient returns...Examples are, RavenCoin which has been gaining traction due to this reason for the past 1 week, Conflux.

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One other beautiful thing the merge will bring about is the reduction of the yearly Ethereum issuance from 4.3% to 0.47%.

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Increasing the burn rate to about 98%, making Ethereum a deflationary token.

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