Many people don’t realize: Transitioning Ethereum to “proof-of-stake” (PoS) – an alternative to “proof-of-work” (PoW) mining for reaching consensus on blocks of transactions – was an insane feat.

Post-Merge, Ethereum is now 100x+ more energy-efficient than it was before. Participating in consensus no longer expends the enormous amount of electricity that PoW does. After The Merge, energy usage of ETH will be comparable to the datacenters of web2.

PoS has direct access to each validator’s “stake”, the funds, or skin-in-the-game, that validators deposit to secure the network. That allows PoS incentives to be far more granular, further increasing security.

PoW mining is subject to economies of scale. The biggest miners have an advantage over smaller players who, as a result, often can’t participate. PoS doesn’t have that challenge – anyone with 32 ETH can now participate as a validator on Ethereum.

A transaction on a PoW blockchain is never truly final. Finality is probabilistic, so there’s always some chance that transactions get rolled back. On a PoS blockchain, transactions that go through consensus are final.