Bitso is closely watching the development of “The Ethereum Merge”. We strongly support Ethereum’s move to Proof of Stake (PoS) and we are preparing for this milestone in crypto history. The Merge represents a truly exciting step in realizing the Ethereum vision.
The Merge is an Ethereum upgrade that marks the end of Proof of Work (PoW) for the network and the full transition to Proof of Stake (PoS). That transition is the merge of the Execution layer (the mainnet we use today) of the network (running under Proof of Work) and the Consensus layer, known as the Beacon Chain (running under Proof of Stake). This change ditches traditional mining and switches to a system where owners of the underlying currency, ether or ETH, can stake it (hence proof-of-stake) in order to power the network.
Our customers that hold ETH or ERC20 tokens at Bitso, don’t need to do anything before nor during The Merge. Funds held in their Bitso wallets before The Merge will be accessible after The Merge. No action on our customer’s part is required for this upgrade. Only as a precautionary action, commonly adopted by the industry, deposits and withdrawals of ETH and ERC20 tokens will be paused for a period of time during the merge until we can verify that everything is properly working. We will inform our community via our status page when deposits and withdrawals are enabled again.
We are closely monitoring a potential chain split. In the event of an actual chain split, we will honor the native chain asset for withdrawals and will open trading pairs depending on market conditions that we will be monitoring and evaluating. We will only honor ERC20s on PoS and won’t be honoring ERC20s on a potential forked chain.
We encourage our community to remain vigilant of the following to avoid scams:
- Avoid sending ETH anywhere in an attempt to upgrade to “ETH2”.
- There is no ETH2 token. The term ‘ETH2’ has been deprecated. It will only be Ethereum.
- There is nothing Bitso customers need to do to keep their funds safe.
We are very excited about this innovation and truly believe it will be an important catalyst for the crypto world and the Ethereum ecosystem. And we will continue to support it.
