Ethereum's latest hard fork, "Muel Glacier," successfully reduced block time by nearly 25%. This hard fork plan is mainly to reduce the difficulty of mining or delay the "difficulty bomb", so as to produce more blocks in a shorter period of time, and also help to solve the expansion problem of Ethereum. According to data provided by Etherscan, after the fork, the average block time on the Ethereum blockchain was reduced from 17.16 seconds to 12.96 seconds. This apparent change can be seen in the table below:
Source: Etherscan
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The decrease in the block production time has also increased the number of mined blocks in the same period of time. According to data reported by Coin Metrics, block production has been increasing and is close to the highest level in history.
Coin Metrics tweeted that
"With the difficulty bomb being postponed, production of the #ethereum block has returned to previous levels."
The number of blocks produced on December 31 was 4,987. With the successful deployment of Muir Glacier, this number has skyrocketed, with 5,676 blocks of production recorded on January 2. Similarly, the number of mined blocks continues to increase. According to the same data, on January 5, the current data miners mined 6,488 blocks with a reward of 13,263.585 ETH.
Ethereum also plans to transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) network to proof-of-stake in the first quarter of 2020, with inflation expected to reach 5% per year, which could be the result of a delay in the difficulty bomb. The ratio is expected to stabilize before September 2021. In order to solve the difficulty bomb problem, developers will have to activate Proof of Stake (PoS) to replace the Proof of Work (PoS) mechanism. Although this is a complex task, developers believe that this transition will achieve the desired goals and help stabilize inflation.
