Ether testnet Sepolia switches to Proof-of-Stake in another step closer to the "Merge"

Ethereum's (ETH-USD) testnet Sepolia on Wednesday has successfully transitioned to Proof-of-Stake bringing the ether blockchain another step closer to its long-awaited switch to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work. Sepolia is the second of three public testnets to have successfully merged. Ropsten was the first testnet merge in June, and the Goerli testnet is expected to launch in the coming weeks. Moreover, Sepolia's Proof-of-Work chain merged with its Proof-of-Stake chain when the Terminal Total Difficulty surpassed 17,000,000,000,000,000 at around 1:00 p.m. ET, CoinDesk reported. Note that once Ethereum's (ETH-USD) upcoming mainnet upgrade takes effect, the blockchain will solely use validators who have staked ether tokens to reach consensus instead of relying on miners. The whole point of Ether's "Merge," which doesn't have an exact launch date, is to improve transaction speeds and boost the ability to scale. Looking at intraday price action, ethereum (ETH-USD) is climbing 3.1% to $1.16K as of shortly before 3:00 p.m. ET. Previously, (April 11) Ethereum accelerated move to Proof-of-Stake after shadow fork launch.