What “The Merge” is And How We Prepare For It

One of the biggest crypto chains, Ethereum, is switching from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (Proof of Stake). The Ethereum merge will greatly lessen Ethereum’s carbon emissions, but there may be some price deviations during and right after The Merge.

By current estimations, The Merge will happen on the 15th of September. That date is not definite as it is based on TTD (Terminal Total Difficulty - the total (cumulative) difficulty threshold required of the final block mined in Ethereum). We’ll be able to predict it more accurately as we approach the TTD conditions.

Note that The Merge will affect the entire Ethereum chain, not just ETH. ERC-20 tokens, such as USDT/USDC, will also be affected.

In short, there will be two parts of The Merge happening in September and two temporary pauses in deposits and withdrawals can be anticipated:

• Around 6th of September (Bellatrix)
• Around 15th of September (Paris)

The Consensus layer upgrade (Bellatrix)

Prior to The Merge, the consensus layer upgrade (Bellatrix) is going to happen on approximately the 6th of September. As per announcements of other exchanges, ICONOMI will pause deposits and withdrawals for a few hours prior to and post the upgrade.

The Ethereum chain merge (Paris)

We will temporarily pause deposits and withdrawals on the Ethereum chain a few hours before the most accurate expected time of the upgrade. Afterwards, we will monitor how the situation progresses and react accordingly, enabling ETH and ERC-20 deposits and withdrawals afterwards. By doing so, we hope to ensure as little disruption as possible.

Trading

As of writing this, it is still unclear how all our partnered exchanges will act. We expect most of our exchange partners to continue trading with the affected assets (ETH and ERC-20 tokens) but also temporarily pause deposits and withdrawals (as already made clear from some exchanges). ICONOMI will continue to trade the affected assets as long as at least 3 of our supported exchanges continue to do so.

Warning:
During this time, users can expect high price volatility. We advise users to:

• pay special attention to their trades during this period,
• review Automated rules and pause or adjust them accordingly. An automated trading rule might be triggered by the above-mentioned price changes.

Listing of potential forked assets

After the Ethereum merge, a hard fork may happen. If it comes to that, the forked token will undergo the same process as any new token before being listed on ICONOMI. If these conditions are met, and if partnered exchanges decide to distribute any forked assets, we will airdrop any received forked tokens to eligible users.