Ethereum Merge and Ethereum 2.0

Ehtereum 2.0 was the term used initially to the long awaited upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain network. One of the most prominent change as part of this upgrade was the move from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake(PoS) as the consensus mechanism for the Ethereum blockchain. This shift to Proof of Stake has lead to a 99% reduction in energy consumption for the Ethereum blockchain making it ESG complaint and also setting the ground work for the move to sharding

History leading to the merge:

Research of moving the Ethereum blockchain to Proof Of Stake began even before the launch of the Ethereum blockchain. To minimise the risk of this transition and risking Billions of dollars worth of transaction happening on the Ehtereum blockchain, developers decided to split this into multiple phases:

In Phase 1 on December 2020 they launched the Beacon Chain which is a fully independent network running in parallel to the current Ethereum mainnet which uses Proof Of Work (PoW) and has all the accounts, smart contracts and blockchain state. This enabled the creation of a paraellel chain that could be tested for a period of time without having impact on the network.

The merge was the second step where the PoS chain got merged with the PoW chain. Merge is responsible for merging the state of Ethereum network with the PoS Beacon chain.

ETH2 going forward:

After the succesful execution of the merge on September 15, 2022 the term "ETH2" has been depreciated.