What is the Ethereum Arrow Glacier upgrade?

Ethereum's Arrow Glacier network upgrade delays the difficulty bomb to June 2022. Many previous upgrades have also extended the difficulty bomb deadline. The difficulty bomb will make mining Ethereum more difficult and unprofitable. This feature motivates the development of Ethereum 2.0 and will force miners to migrate to the new Proof of Stake blockchain.

The update contains an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that delays the difficulty bomb. An EIP is a change proposal created and reviewed by the Ethereum community. Arrow Glacier is particularly interesting given that it is intended to be the last extension to the difficulty bomb before the release of Ethereum 2.0.

What is the Ethereum difficulty bomb?

The Ethereum blockchain currently uses a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. This means that users validating transactions have to use computational power to solve mathematical puzzles. This process incurs a cost in consensus building, thus protecting the network from malicious actors.

A difficulty bomb would be included, gradually increasing the difficulty of such puzzles, making successful block mining more expensive. At some point in the future, the difficulty bomb will "explode", making it virtually impossible to validate transactions and add new blocks. Blockchain mining will simply be too expensive. The difficulty bomb was added for two reasons:

1. To help motivate the development of Ethereum 2.0 and the transition to the Proof of Stake (PoS) model.

2. Forcing miners to implement the update that makes way for the new PoS blockchain, as they will no longer be able to mine Ether (ETH) on the old PoW version of Ethereum. This prevents the creation of two conflicting Ethereum networks as a result of a hard fork.

What is an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)?

An EIP can propose any improvements or changes to Ethereum. Anyone can create an EIP, which is reviewed by the Ethereum community, a council of publishers, and the Ethereum developers. To be included in an update, the EIP must pass the approval process. Each EIP contains the technical requirements for a specific change based on a specific EIP format. We briefly mentioned that Arrow Glacier contains only one EIP, in this case, EIP-4345. Their only goal is to extend the time period before the ice age of Ethereum mining.

How will the Ethereum Arrow Glacier upgrade affect me?

For the standard user, there will be no noticeable difference. Block confirmation times have remained constant, around 13 seconds, over the past year. If you operate a node or are a miner, you will need to update your Ethereum client to the latest version. Otherwise, your client will point to the old fork of Ethereum, which will no longer be officially supported by the community.