Gnosis Merge plans for today when the blockchain migrates to Proof of Stake

• Gnosis follows in the footsteps of Ethereum by migrating to a Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol.

• Gnosis is migrating from a Proof of Authority mechanism to PoS.

• The developers are working to ensure that The Merge is successful.

Gnosis network to migrate to a PoS protocol

Privacy-focused Gnosis, one of the first sidechains of Ethereum, is set to implement its own version of Merge a few hours from now.

📣 Official merger announcement

The highly anticipated Gnosis Merge is upon us! 🦉

Gnosis Chain Merge expected around Thu Dec 08 18:47 2022 UTC.

🧵 Details below👇 pic.twitter.com/qy1WYkvwBT

— Gnosis Chain 🦉 (@gnosischain) 6 December 2022

The merger will see Gnosis migrate from a proof-of-authority (PoA) chain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) beacon chain. According to the development team, the migration will take place today, December 8, when a certain predetermined Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) is reached.

Gnosis will be the largest blockchain to conduct The Merge after Ethereum migrated to the PoS chain in September. Ethereum migrated from a Proof of Work mechanism, while Gnosis will drop its Proof of Authority (PoA) mechanism for PoS.

PoA works similarly to the PoS mechanism. However, instead of staking assets (as seen in PoS blockchains), PoA validators are staking their reputation. This means that the validators must meet certain requirements in order to be considered reliable in society.

Like PoS, PoA is less energy intensive compared to the Proof of Work mechanism. This is because there are fewer computational resources needed to ensure that validators perform their functions.

The main difference between PoA and PoS is that PoA is more centralized since it only elects a few validators. The number of validators in PoS blockchains is much higher, making it more decentralized.

Gnosis should have more than 100,000 validators after The Merge

The merger will see Gnosis go from having about 20 validators running the blockchain to over 100,000 validators performing functions. Gnosis will be the blockchain with the second highest number of validators, just behind Ethereum with over 440,000 validators.

Tomorrow, exactly 1 year after the Gnosis Beacon chain was launched, it will merge with the Gnosis Chain, replacing a limited set of <20 validators with over 100,000 validators from around the world. That will make Gnosis the chain with the second most validators and closest to Eth. pic.twitter.com/ywbIxhxS4E

— Martin Köppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann) 7 December 2022

Speaking to CoinDesk, Stefan George, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Gnosis said;

“In the trilemma of scalability, decentralization and security, we focus on decentralization. Unlike many ‘Ethereum killers’, who favor scalability over decentralization, cheap block space is a commodity, while decentralized block space is a scarce resource.”

He added that Gnosis is happy to see that Ethereum Merge was successful and it gave them the confidence to believe that they can use Merge successfully in Gnosis Chain. He concluded that;

“Initially, the goal was to do the Merge on Gnosis Chain before the Merge of Ethereum to show that it can be done safely on Ethereum. It turned out to be more complicated on Gnosis Chain since we did not switch from PoW, but PoA and had to adapt the existing the code.”