Google has launched a countdown tool for Ethereum’s (ETH) impending merger as interest in the top smart contract platform’s upgrade dramatically increases worldwide.
Sam Padilla, a blockchain developer for Research Cloud, announced the new function a few days ago and warned his Twitter followers to google the term “the merge” because they would be in for a surprise.
“Go Google ‘the merge’ for a fun little surprise and appreciation. Everyone is so excited for what is coming and appreciative of the work that has been going into this for years.”
The newly added function maintains track of the number of days, hours, and minutes until Ethereum’s eagerly awaited switch from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. It also monitors the hash rate and difficulty settings for Ethereum.
Following a record-breaking surge in global interest in The Merge, Google announced its newest addition. According to Google Trends, “Ethereum merge” searches have gradually increased over the past year and then skyrocketed in the last two months. Padilla continues by saying that although he proposed the concept of a countdown, others really implemented it.
“It wasn’t just me. And the actual lifting of the work was on the search and labs team internally. All I did was kickstart the idea and discussion that led to this hehe But this is indeed pretty cool.”
Recent Google search data has revealed that searches for the term “Ethereum Merge” generated a score above 50 several times over the last 30 days, reaching a peak of 100 on Sept. 3.
The Ethereum blockchain will permanently switch from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus system to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism as part of the Merge update, which aims to save energy and offer sharding features.
Ethereum has increased in value despite the downturn that the market has been experiencing; it is currently trading around $1,721, down about 2% in the last day.