Ethereum is expected to undergo a network upgrade around September 15, 2020, depending on when the terminal total difficulty (58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000) is reached. After the upgrade is complete, Ethereum's Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism will be replaced by the new Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This Ethereum upgrade is implemented through a hard fork, which may generate a PoW fork chain. BitTorrent Chain follows the choice of the Ethereum community, will only support the Ethereum PoS chain after the merge, and will not support the Ethereum PoW chain.
This upgrade will not affect BitTorrent Chain smart contracts already deployed on Ethereum, and BitTorrent Chain delegators and token holders do not need to prepare for a possible fork. After the merge, the number of block confirmations on the Ethereum network will increase, so the withdrawal and deposit time between Ethereum and BitTorrent Chain will also be extended.
Since BitTorrent Chain validator nodes will regularly submit checkpoint transactions to the Ethereum mainnet after the Ethereum merge is done, if a PoW fork chain is generated, BitTorrent Chain validators should ensure the eth_rpc_url field in the delivery-config.toml configuration file of delivery service is set to the RPC domain name of the Ethereum PoS chain. For the setting instruction, please refer to Configuring the Delivery Service. We recommend validators set the above domain name to the Ethereum mainnet domain name provided by Infura before the merge. Infura has prepared for the Ethereum Merge. For details, see: What is Infura doing to prepare for the Merge?
For more information on Ethereum Merge, see The Merge.