I just looked back at Ethereum's history and realized that The Merge is truly a major milestone that many people may not fully understand. A few years ago, the Ethereum network transitioned from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake—that was the key point to solving issues of congestion and enormous energy consumption.

The core problem Ethereum has faced for a long time is the inability to scale quickly enough. When PoW (Proof of Work) is still running, each block must be mined at a fixed rate, limiting the number of transactions that can be processed. This leads to high gas fees and network congestion during periods of high demand. The Merge was created to address exactly this issue.

By the way, Vitalik Buterin has mentioned the concept of the scalability trilemma—balancing scalability, security, and decentralization is not easy. PoW is difficult to scale due to its inherent limitations. Instead, The Merge integrates two layers: the execution layer and the consensus layer (Beacon Chain) to transition to PoS.

After The Merge, nodes called validators will replace miners. Instead of competing to add new blocks, validators are randomly selected to confirm candidate blocks and receive rewards from transaction fees and staking rewards. This approach consumes significantly fewer resources compared to PoW.

Interestingly, after The Merge is completed, the new issuance of ETH drops by about 90%—from approximately 13,000 ETH per day to 1,600 ETH per day. Only staking rewards remain; mining rewards are gone. According to supply and demand laws, this could positively impact ETH's price in theory, but markets are always more complex than predictions.

Beyond The Merge, Ethereum has a long-term roadmap including The Surge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Sharding is the next important part, expected to split the blockchain into multiple shards to increase transaction throughput. Each shard contains only a portion of the data, allowing nodes to verify more efficiently.

Ethereum's transaction history has been merged with the Beacon Chain, but ETH remains ETH—users don't need to do anything special. For ETH holders, this event almost doesn't directly affect their assets.

Looking back, The Merge is the second major event in Ethereum's upgrade chain, marking the shift from PoW to PoS. Once all upgrades are implemented, Ethereum is expected to handle much higher transaction volumes while maintaining security and decentralization. This is a long-term journey to prepare Ethereum for mass adoption in the future.