3 Reasons Why ‘The Merge’ Won’t Reduce Gas Fees

As we all know the merge is set to occur around September 15/16 at a TTD of 58750000000000000000000. TTD: Terminal Total Difficulty, it’s…

As we all know the merge is set to occur around September 15/16 at a TTD of 58750000000000000000000. TTD: Terminal Total Difficulty, it’s the total difficulty required to mine the last block at POW, after that, the next block is produced by POS. It’s simply the last block switch from POW to POS.

With all the euphoria and hype about the merge, the gas fee issue will persist. Here are the reasons why👇🏻

1. The Merge isn’t a complicated term, it’s simply the total switch from POW to POS, rendering mining useless in the ETH chain. Validators (POS) are replaced with miners (POW) -this however will cause a ripple effect: Eth chain will be more secure, scalable, and sustainable. 
The Merge only upgrades the consensus layer (POW) to beacon Chain (POS), it doesn’t affect the execution layer (Eth main chain) or data availability layer (Sharding).
Note: the beacon chain has been on Eth since 2020 December, what’s happening in September is to remove POW.

2. Miners don’t determine the price of the gas fee. The price of gas depends on three factors: blockspace, supply, and demand. Supply is constant and there is a limited amount of blockspace, people pay fees to get in a block (demand). The amount (gas fee) they are willing to pay depends on supply and demand.
Hence, replacing miners with validators doesn’t affect supply or demand.

3. Rollups (polygon, arbitrum, optimism, zk) are the future of ETH scalability and are in the Eth roadmap. Rollups are live and are helping to scale ETH, but the main character in the whole play is sharding which is set to launch next year until then the gas issue will persist. 
Sharding will split the Eth into 64 different chains (shard chain). Rollups will create a cryptographic proof after performing transactions and submit it back to the chain, specifically a shard chain which stores the proof — this will result in Ethereum being able to process 100k transactions per second.

Sharding remains a key factor in reducing gas fees. If gas fee is still an issue for you, pray there’s no demand for a certain blockspace in your transaction or cry to devs to be fast to launch Sharding. Adios

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Please remember to do your research. None of this is financial advice.