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Gnosis follows in the footsteps of Ethereum in migrating to a Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol.
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Gnosis is migrating from Proof of Authorization mechanism to PoS.
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The developers are working to ensure that the merge is successful.
Gnosis Network to migrate to a PoS protocol
Privacy-focused Gnosis, one of Ethereum’s first sidechains, is set to complete its own version of the merge a few hours from now.
📣 Official Merger Announcement
The highly anticipated Gnosis Merge is upon us!
The Gnosis chain merge is expected around Thu Dec 08 18:47 2022 UTC.
🧵details below👇 pic.twitter.com/qy1WYkvwBT
— Gnosis Chain 🦉 (@gnosischain) December 6, 2022
the merge Will see Gnosis migrate from the Proof-of-Authority (PoA) chain to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) beacon chain. According to the development team, the migration will happen today, December 8, when a certain predetermined Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD) is reached.
Gnosis will then become the dominant blockchain to complete the merge. Ethereum moved to PoS chain in September. Ethereum migrated from a Proof of Work mechanism, while Gnosis will eliminate its Proof of Authority (PoA) mechanism for PoS.
PoA works in the same way as a POS system. However, instead of staking assets (as seen in PoS blockchains), PoA validators stake their reputations. This implies that validators must meet certain requirements in order to be considered trustworthy within the community.
Similar to PoS, PoA is less energy intensive than proof of work. This is because validators require fewer computational resources to complete their tasks.
The major difference between PoA and PoS is that PoA is more centralized as it selects only a few validators. The PoS blockchain has a much larger number of validators, making it more decentralized.
Gnosis will have over 100k validators after the merge
The merge will see Gnosis go from roughly 20 validators running the blockchain to over 100,000 validators operating. Gnosis will be the blockchain with the second largest number of validators right behind Ethereum with over 440k validators.
Tomorrow, exactly 1 year after the launch of the Gnosis Beacon Chain, it will merge with the Gnosis Chain and replace a limited set of <20 validators with over 100,000 validators from around the world. This would turn Gnosis into the second most validator chain and closest to eth. pic.twitter.com/ywbIxhxS4E
— Martin Koppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann) December 7, 2022
Speaking to CoinDesk, Stephen 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 blockspace is a commodity while decentralized blockspace is a scarce resource.
He added that Gnosis is happy to see the Ethereum merge succeed, and it gives them the confidence to believe they can successfully implement the merge on the Gnosis chain. He concluded that;
“Initially, the goal was to merge on Gnosis Chain before Ethereum merges, to show that it could be done safely on Ethereum. It turned out to be more complicated on Gnosis Chain because we switched from PoW, not PoW. and had to adapt existing code.