With the long-awaited Ethereum Merge having materialized, it left as a consequence two (2) historical NFTs representing the last block of the previous Ethereum based Proof of Work and the first of Ethereum 2.0.
After many announcements over the past few years regarding the Ethereum merge, the long-awaited day has arrived.
On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum Merge took place, leaving behind the classic consensus protocol called Proof of Work (PoW), which requires considerable computational power in order to produce the mathematical algorithm for the generation of a new blockchain link.
The new system called Proof of Stake (PoS) seeks to reduce between 95% and 99% of the energy consumption required by the previous mining system, and now consists of staking the miners’ ETH as a method of generating trust, blocking their tokens and thus adding liquidity to the network.
By virtue of the current Merge activation to Ethereum 2.0, it resulted in 2 NFTs that have marked this transition, from the passage of Proof of Work (PoW) and the advent of Proof of Stake (PoS).
The last block mined in Ethereum 1.0 was used to mine 1 unique NFT, which they called it “The last POW block”.. For the mining alone they paid 31 ETH, an equivalent of u$s50,000 approximately, and for transaction fees about 1.3 ETH.
The company in charge of such NFT was VanityBlocks, which is known for mining various types of NFTs. Such a transaction occupies an entire block in Ethereum, so they do not share space with other transactions or other data.
The fact of keeping the entire block was already analyzed beforehand, so the company had been working on it for more than 1 month. Likewise, the founder of VanityBlocks stated that they had about a 15% chance of being able to keep the block.
The NFT auction has already been announced as the last PoW block on Ethereum 1.0, and is currently published on OpenSea by 10ETH.
Just as the last block mined in the Ethereum 1.0 phase was concretized in a non-fungible token, the first block of the new Ethereum 2.0 with PoS-based consensus also has an NFT.
The NFT of the first block after the Merge is named “The Transition.” and is intended to mark a milestone on the road to decentralization. This block was the first transaction conducted and confirmed on Ethereum under the new proof-of-stake consensus protocol.
After the NFT has been mined, it has been transferred to a decentralized application (dApp) that is dedicated to autonomous auctions. These NFTs have been mined in the methodology of a collection, so each edition will be distributed as auctions are carried out on a daily basis.
Written by Luciano Garriga (TW:@luchogarriga) for NFT Express