The Merge—Ethereum’s historic energy-efficient overhaul—is complete

More than 41,000 people were tuned in on YouTube on Wednesday night, watching with bated breath as metrics trickled in to show cryptocurrency Ethereum’s massive overhaul—the Merge—was successful.

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market value of nearly $200 billion has now shifted to a vastly more energy-efficient system after eight years of development and delay.

“It was no small feat swapping out one way of running a blockchain, known as proof-of-work, for another, called proof-of-stake,” per CoinDesk. “The payoff is potentially gigantic. Ethereum should now consume 99.9% less energy.”

Unbelievable transition
The transition, a complicated endeavor that required coordination across dozens of teams of researchers and developers, was so risky that many doubted it could happen.

“There’s a part of me which hasn’t completely realized that this is actually happening,” said Justin Drake, a researcher at the non-profit Ethereum Foundation. “I’m somewhat in denial, you know, because I’ve trained myself to just expect it to happen in the future.”

Mining ‘farms’ no more
The Merge entirely does away with crypto mining in energy-guzzling “farms”—warehouses lined with “computers stacked on top of one another like shelves of books at a university library”—that earned the blockchain sector its reputation as an environmental menace, said the CoinDesk report.

Check this: Bitcoin consumes an estimated 150 terawatt hours a year. That’s more electricity than 45 million people in Argentina use up. Till the Merge was complete, Ethereum was eating up about 62 million terawatt hours each year.

Say hello to ‘stakers’
Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake system replaces miners with “validators,” who would need to “stake” at least 32 ether ($52,000) by depositing the cryptocurrency to a protocol where it cannot be bought or sold.

The staked ether tokens act like lottery tickets: “If your token number is called, you win the right to verify the next block and earn the rewards that entail,” explained Cnet’s Daniel Van Boom.