The Ethereum merge will complete this September, and this is a major step in the ETH 2.0 transition. With such a massive change being implemented, we wanted to reassure you we have been planning for it and to let you know what it means for you as a customer.

The Merge will transition Ethereum from a Proof-Of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism. This milestone will bring the Beacon chain and Mainnet Ethereum chain together and will result in Ethereum becoming more energy efficient and environmentally friendly, making it easier to align with ESG policies. It will also bring the chain closer to adding sharding to Ethereum, which will reduce gas fees and improve transaction speeds.

The nature of The Merge means that we can’t give you an exact time and date that it will occur, but we estimate it will happen between the 12th and 15th of September.

We will NOT be pausing any form of transactions across Ethereum mainnet during The Merge. This is because as a custodian we do not want to impact customers choice for interacting on chain. Additionally, since we don't perform any form of asset swap or off chain exchange (such as fiat for crypto) we are unaffected by an re-orgs that may occur on the chain. Ultimately we show the state of the chain.

We will be supporting the Ethereum PoS chain and have been preparing for The Merge so you should not experience any changes to your business flow. TrustVault and our MetaMask extension will continue to operate following the event. We may, however, experience some temporary instability in the network during The Merge because of forks in the chain. This could temporarily affect webhooks and push notifications.

During The Merge, you may find that some exchanges, DEXs and Protocols pause transactions, deposits and withdrawals, so check with any you are using and plan accordingly. We also ask that you maintain heightened awareness of potential ETH2 token scams following The Merge.

For anyone wishing to access the ETH PoW chain, officially it will not be supported by us, but we are testing the implications and expect that using TrustVault MetaMask with your own RPC endpoint pointing to the forked PoW chain will allow you to sign transactions. However, it is likely that any transaction reporting or webhooks will not work. We will publish more information here.

We will keep you informed through our status page on any issues if they arise.

With thanks,

The Bitpanda Custody team