The Ethereum Merge Has an Official Kick-Off Date

The Ethereum Foundation announced today the official parameters for the long-awaited Merge upgrade.

• The Bellatrix upgrade will activate on the Beacon Chain on Sept. 6. This upgrade is responsible for setting the rest of the Merge process in motion.
  
• The activation is scheduled for epoch 144896 on the Beacon Chain, which should occur at around 11:34:47 UTC.
  
• After this, the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) value triggering the Merge will be 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000. That TTD expected to be reached somewhere between September 10-20. The Ethereum Developers have hinted in past calls that they are aiming for September 15-16.
  
• During this period, the difficulty level will increase to the point where proof-of-work mining will no longer be possible.
  
• When TTD reaches 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000, the network will merge its Execution layer with the new Consensus layer and transition to the new proof-of-stake consensus protocol.
  
• The Merge comes after a series of dress rehearsals that tested transitions from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake on multiple test network (testnet) environments, including Ropsten, Sepolia, Goerli.