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Tron founder Justin Sun, new owner of the Steemit social network based on the Steem token, appears to have successfully executed a takeover of Steem by leveraging not only tokens directly controlled, but also tokens held on several major exchanges, in order to vote out the previous delegates (Steem uses a delegated proof-of-stake system) and install new ones. This means that customers of these exchanges likely had their funds used without their consent in this blockchain power struggle.

As the Ethereum community anticipates the long-awaited launch of Ethereum 2.0, users are also bracing themselves for a major systematic shift from a proof-of-work model to a proof-of-stake. PoS systems consume exponentially less power and systematically increase decentralization by lowering the barrier of entry to network participation. While the transition from PoW to PoS may be initially difficult for the community, this article proposes five principles to make the transition easier for everyone.

The European Blockchain Association published a joint industry position paper on staking in a European Union (EU) regulatory context. To date, there is no uniform consensus on how this process and its various manifestations are to be defined in concrete terms, which has led to legal uncertainty, sometimes with considerable consequences. The paper aims to make a clear distinction between staking and lending depending on the actual underlying technical process, and to differentiate between the different types of staking.

After years of waiting, debating, and delays, Ethereum's pending merge to proof-of-stake finally has a launch date. Now, Ethereums's miners are finally going to have to answer a multi-billion dollar question: what will they mine when Ethereum 2.0 launches?

After eight years of promises the merge of the ETH blockchain into the new Beacon Chain system, formerly ETH2, is scheduled for some time between 15 and 20 September 2022. If it happens this time, then hooray! Proof-of-work mining is a crime against humanity. Using a country's worth of electricity, and thus pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, is unconscionable. But that won't suddenly make cryptocurrency good. Proof-of-stake still doesn't fix all the other problems with Ethereum, or cryptocurrency more broadly. For example, decentralisation is always fake. Proof-of-stake pretends to change that - and it just doesn't.

The Bellatrix upgrade preparing Ethereum for the Merge was successfully completed on September 6, 2022. This upgrade brought Ethereum's consensus layer, the Beacon Chain, into a ready state for the Merge which is slated to occur around September 15 once the final ("Paris") upgrade goes live. Some concerns were raised over an almost one in ten missed block rate across the last 600 slots. This could be due to some validators being not fully upgraded to the latest software, which could leave them unable participate in the post-merge proof-of-stake network.

"The Merge will see a big change in the amount of ether (ETH) that's issued each year. It will reduce issuance by roughly 90% - and could see the network become deflationary."

On September 15, 2022 the Ethereum blockchain merged with a special-purpose decentralized ledger called the Beacon Chain, concluding its transition to near-carbon neutrality. Since its inception, Ethereum has been based on the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) system. Now it will run on a proof-of-stake (PoS) system in which miners have been replaced with validators, who pledge, or stake, ether tokens as collateral to verify transactions and accrue interest on the staked assets as a reward. As a result, the network's energy usage should drop by more than 99%, according to the Ethereum Foundation.

Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a five-step process that will bring the smart contract blockchain to the 'Endgame' of Ethereum's development. The end goal would see the network capable of high block frequency and block size as well as the ability to process thousands of transactions per second while remaining sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant. For example, the plan is to implement sharding to increase the scalability of the blockchain's ability to store and access data.

"Prior to The Merge, Ethereum used to have dozens upon dozens of mining pools dedicating hashrate toward the blockchain network. That has all changed and most of the miners transitioned or plan on transitioning to other Ethash compatible coins like ethereum classic, ERGO, and the new fork ETHW. Now Ethereum blocks are verified by validators and at the time of writing, there are 429,278 validators. However, a great deal of the 13.7 million staked ethereum is held by four known providers."

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler reportedly has said that staked crypto-assets may be subject to federal securities regulations, in the wake of Ethereum's transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. He reportedly said that PoS crypto-assets pass the Howey test under which an asset is considered an "investment contract" if investors pledge their money to a common enterprise with an expectation of a profit to be derived from the efforts of others. Adam Levitin runs through the Howey test logic that would deem Ethereum to now be a security for SEC purposes.

Adam Levitin runs through the Howey test logic that could deem Ethereum to now be a security for SEC purposes.

Crypto exchange Kraken will "immediately" end its crypto staking-as-a-service platform for U.S. customers and pay $30 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges it offered unregistered securities. Staking is a process in which investors lock up their crypto tokens with a blockchain validator with the goal of being rewarded with new tokens when their staked crypto tokens become part of the process for validating data for the blockchain. The SEC alleged that Kraken was offering investment contracts in exchange for investors' tokens, without providing the proper disclosures and safeguards required by US securities laws. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-25

US SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce publicly rebuked her own agency over the shutdown of crypto exchange Kraken's crypto staking program in the United States, arguing that regulation by enforcement "is not an efficient or fair way of regulating" an emerging industry. "Using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating. Moreover, staking services are not uniform, so one-off enforcement actions and cookie-cutter analysis does not cut it." https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-statement-kraken-020923