Monitoring the Merge with Nethermind

Nethermind and Forta have a longstanding relationship bound by a dedication to the health of the Ethereum ecosystem. Building a tool to monitor the most significant upgrade the network has ever seen is a natural extension of that. This article was authored by the Nethermind team.

Today Nethermind and Forta are announcing the deployment of two monitoring bots custom built for anyone to track milestones leading up to the Merge, currently estimated to occur between 10th-20th September.

The Merge is the long-awaited next step in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap, and will mark the end of the highly debated proof-of-work consensus algorithm. Ethereum will soon transition to a proof-of-stake system, immediately reducing its energy consumption by ~99.95%. With over $200 billion in market cap and the eyes of the world watching, there is a lot at stake. For Ethereum client teams and protocol engineers, the Merge will be the culmination of years of work, and non-developers in the community will all be holding their breaths for the approximately 12 minutes it will take the transition to finalize.

Monitoring the merge is in the interest of everyone in the ecosystem as all have a stake in this transformation. Here is what you’ll be able to monitor with Nethermind’s Forta Merge Bots:

The first Merge bot tracks milestones in TTD (Total Terminal Difficulty), which is the pre-determined threshold at which the transition will occur.

The second Merge bot will be triggered when a block’s difficulty deviates too much from a moving average of the difficulty of past blocks.

You can track this dashboard directly in the Forta Explorer or subscribe to the bots' alerts via email, Discord, and more.

About Nethermind

Nethermind is an Ethereum Research and Software Engineering company enabling enterprises and developers worldwide to build on the decentralized web. Our work touches every part of the ecosystem, from our Nethermind node to fundamental cryptography research and application-layer protocol development. Partnerships include Ethereum Foundation, StarkWare, Uniswap, Energy Web, and more.

About Forta

Forta is a real-time detection network for security & operational monitoring of blockchain activity. Forta is a real-time detection network for security & operational monitoring of blockchain activity. As a decentralized monitoring network, Forta detects threats and anomalies on DeFi, NFT, governance, bridges and other Web3 systems in real-time.