User paid nearly $60,000 to issue NFT commemorating The Merge

In the first block after Ethereum’s transition to the consensus Proof-of-Stake, a user minted an NFT, paying 36.8 ETH (~$58,700) as a transaction fee.

The Merge activation took place on September 15 at approximately 9:42 (Kyiv/Moscow time) after the network reached terminal difficulty of 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000.

The last PoW-block in the chain was #15,537,393. The mining pool F2Pool added a comment:

“You take on commitments, and nature will answer this by removing possible obstacles. Dream of the impossible, and the world will not trample you, but will lift you up. In this trick.”

In the the first PoS block, HashKey Capital inserted the message:

“Launch of the next wave of blockchain innovations”.

In the transaction included in it, the user minted an NFT named The Transition. Listed on the OpenSea marketplace collection includes 100 tokens dedicated to the Ethereum merge. As of writing, the maximum offer from collectors is 0.6 ETH.

Total rewards to validators for block #15,537,394 amounted to 45 ETH. For the previous one, miners earned 44.5 ETH.

As reported, Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and one of Ethereum’s co-founders, called The Merge “the third major event in the crypto industry”.

However, in the view of Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex and Tether, the upgrade will not solve the network’s scalability and decentralization problems.

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