“Usefulness has passed,” the OpenEthereum team wrote of their popular software, “we look forward to the next phase of a clean, green, and scalable blockchain infrastructure.”
One of the most popular Ethereum customers, OpenEthereum, has ended support for its software in preparation for the upcoming Ethereum merger.
OpenEthereum creates “clients” or software used to interact with the Ethereum network, allowing anyone to create an Ethereum node to mine Ethereum (ETH), which currently uses the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.
In a Twitter thread, the OpenEthereum team stated that with an imminent merger and a legacy codebase that was “increasingly difficult to manage” due to its age, it was time to end support.
The project was previously owned by blockchain infrastructure company Parity Technologies before being acquired by decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) OpenEthereum in December 2019.
Parity wrote at the time that they wanted to ensure that the code base “is maintained and lives for as long as the community deems it useful”, writes OpenEthereum:
“The benefit has run its course and we look forward to the next phase of a clean, green and scalable blockchain infrastructure.”
The OpenEthereum team wrote that “well-documented” customers were needed to “steer the upcoming merger and successfully transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS)” and instructed users to move customers to other providers such as Nethermind or Erigon switch.
Related: Core Ethereum developer details pending after merge
The Merge is the name of a planned update to the Ethereum blockchain that will merge the existing proof-of-stake beacon chain, launched in December 2020, with the current proof-of-work mainnet, which handles transactions on the network validated.
The planned upgrade has had constant delays since it was first proposed in 2016, and originally had a rollout date of 2019. The merger was supposed to happen in mid-2022, but it was delayed in April.
With the Repsten-Testnet merger looming, Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon said last week that the upgrade would happen in August 2022 “if all goes according to plan”.
