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Chainlink Plans to Only Support PoS After Ethereum Merge

Chainlink has announced that it will not support any proof-of-work Ethereum forks after Ethereum’s merge to proof-of-stake.

In a memo to the community, the smart contract oracle provider said it wants to align with the Ethereum community’s social consensus to change Ethereum’s consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. To ensure minimal disruption, Chainlink is conducting a thorough quality check.

Ethereum has been undergoing a transition from being a network that relies on so-called miners to validate transactions (proof-of-work), an energy-intensive process, to a network that instead relies on so-called validators that “stake” Ethereum tokens for a chance to validate transactions (proof-of-stake).

One Chinese developer Hongcai Gu has reportedly assembled a team of 60 developers to remove the difficulty bomb, a part of the Ethereum code designed to push Ethereum miners away from the proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

Other miners may continue mining ETC on the Ethereum Classic blockchain, the first version of Ethereum, to ensure that their mining equipment doesn’t become obsolete.

Analysts have cautioned against forks developed for short-term goals without considering how the network will be supported in the long run.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he does not expect forks to harm the Ethereum network.

Chainlink assured the community that the protocol and its services would be operational throughout and after Ethereum’s merge. It recommended that customers unsure of the merge’s impact on their decentralized applications and smart contracts pause their operations to protect users. Smart contracts developed and deployed on proof-of-work blockchains may behave in unexpected ways. Developers accessing any of Chainlink’s oracles in their smart contracts must test whether the service works before and after the merge.

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko, spearheading the software development for merging the current Ethereum blockchain with the Beacon chain, a new proof-of-stake consensus layer, said that ideally, users of
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