It’s official. At 6:43 a.m. UTC, on September 15th, Ethereum’s Merge was initiated and was finalized about 15 minutes later to the great excitement of the 41,000+ viewers of the YouTube «Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party» and local viewing parties wherever there is a crypto community. With this switch from PoW to PoS, Ethereum cut 99.99% of its energy usage (estimated around 0.02% of global energy usage, roughly the equivalent of Finland). It also eliminated the role of miners, relying instead on a system of validators.