End-of-Week Ethereum: Developers Firm Up Merge Date, Hedge Fund Investor Says Merge is ‘Not Priced In’, Aave Proposes Strongly Signaling Support for PoS

cryptonews.com:

Ethereum (ETH) developers firmed up September 15 as the date when the highly anticipated Merge is estimated to happen, while Aave (AAVE) seeks to "strongly signal" its support for the PoS chain instead of PoW. Meanwhile, a crypto hedge fund manager says the Merge is not yet priced in by the market.

The September 15 date, which was first mentioned during last week’s Ethereum developer call, was confirmed in Thursday’s call, with the developers saying that things will likely go as planned as long as there is no massive shift in the hashrate. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko added: 

“We got it. Mainnet release -- that’s pretty exciting.”

With the Merge approaching - although it is still tentative and could change - participants on the call also discussed Ethereum’s 11th mainnet “shadow fork” occurring on Thursday, and according to a summary posted on Twitter by Beiko, the 34 nodes made it through “without issues,” with one node “simply not having synced.”

In addition, another topic discussed during the call was censorship resistance and whether the transition from the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS) will make the network less censorship resistant.

Among those who voiced their opinion on the issue, developer Marius van der Wijden called censorship resistance “the hill I am willing to die on.” 

“If we start allowing users to be censored on Ethereum, then this whole thing does not make sense, and I will be leaving and starting something else,” he said.

Ethereum’s Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was brought up and re-confirmed.

“In short, TTD confirmed,” Beiko wrote in his summary on Twitter, adding that “the only thing that could cause the TTD to change would be a massive drop in hashrate once Bellatrix is