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The Merge is one of the most significant events in the cryptocurrency industry. That was the time when Ethereum moved from PoW jobs to PoS. It’s an important part of Ethereum’s roadmap to scaling, making the blockchain more secure and environmentally friendly. This important event was carried out for many years in collaboration with industry teams individual developers and collaborators around the world.
However, with 119 core developers working on The Merge and thousands of programmers contributing to the overall Ethereum protocol. Besides, there is no denying that some people played important roles in The Merge event. Here are the 10 most important figures who contributed to the historical event of the Ethereum blockchain: The Merge.
Aidan Hyman, CEO, and co-founder of Chainsafe
Aidan Hyman is the CEO and co-founder of Chainsafe, a blockchain research, and development company. Chainsafe operates on many different blockchain projects. Lodestar, one of the company’s projects is playing a key role in The Merge as a partner implementing Ethereum’s PoS algorithm. Lodestar aims to allow individuals to easily host their own Staking validators and verify blockchain data.
Lodestar eliminates the reliance on centralized providers for network authentication. The project is open source and written in the popular programming language Typecript, which is accessible to the developer community. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin provided ChainSafe with its first funding to develop Lodestar in 2018. Several ChainSafe members were also involved in the launch of the Goerli test network, the last of which was the final The Merge test before the Mainnet launch.
Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation
Danny Ryan is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports Ethereum and its related technologies. He is the lead coordinator for the implementation of Ethereum upgrades. He regularly contributes to the Ethereum Foundation blog, providing progress updates on The Merge and Ethereum’s roadmap.
Ryan became involved in the conversion of Ethereum to PoS in 2017. He describes his role at the Ethereum Foundation as opening up discussions to decide on timelines and issues related to creating a more widespread, secure, and sustainable Ethereum, as well as helping to carry out research and development to proposed solutions.
Paul Hauner, Co-Founder of Sigma Prime
Paul Hauner is the co-founder of Sigma Prime, an information security consulting firm. He also founded the Lighthouse project and is a partner on Ethereum’s consensus mechanism. Since 2018, the Lighthouse project has raised funds from the Ethereum Foundation, infrastructure company ConsenSys, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Lighthouse is an Ethereum consensus application for implementing a PoS algorithm focused on speed and security. Sigma Prime maintains a client that individuals can download to run validators for the Ethereum consensus layer. The Lighthouse team has also been actively involved in analyzing the specification and security of PoS on Ethereum.
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation
Justin Drake is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. He joined the foundation in 2017 and previously founded a startup called Duo Money.. Drake first got involved in cryptocurrency in 2013, when he founded the Cambridge Bitcoin Meetup team. Recently, he has received a lot of public attention regarding The Merge because of the prospect of staking rewards after The Merge.
Drake describes his role at the Ethereum Foundation as staying informed about internal and public discussions as well as performing technical and research coordination for the platform. Recently, he is doing further research into the relevance of Maximal Extractable Valu (MEV) and consensus.
Pooja Ranjan, project manager at Ethereum Cat Herders
Pooja Ranjan is the Herder-General Manager of Ethereum Cat Herders. She also founded the Ethereum news site EtherWorld and worked as a senior software engineer at Accenture.
Ethereum Cat Herders is a team that supports Ethereum’s core developers. In addition, the team put together educational videos on Ethereum improvement proposals (EIP) or design documents related to The Merge as well as other topics.
Vitalik Buterin, Co-Founder of Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin is the most famous Ethereum co-founder, commonly known as the creator of the protocol. Buterin, a Russian-Canadian programmer helped found Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 before publishing the Ethereum Whitepaper in 2014.
Despite no longer being the core developer of Ethereum, Buterin played an invaluable role in communicating about The Merge event when it introduced a new consensus mechanism design philosophy in 2016. Since then, Buterin has regularly appeared to discuss the Ethereum Roadmap and share technical articles with perspectives on wide-ranging cryptocurrency topics.
Tim Beiko, Protocol Support for Ethereum foundation
Tim Beiko is the core developer of Ethereum, he joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2021 after quitting his job as a product manager with ConsenSys.
With the responsibility of running the biweekly core developer meetings, Beiko takes on the role of bringing the Ethereum developer community together. The meetings focused on important discussions about network upgrades and improvements, including many of the updates needed to prepare for the transition to PoS.
Beiko was the one who announced in July the goals of The Merge. He also played a large role in helping to push the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 (EIP-1559), which was part of the London upgrade that introduced a new mechanism for the protocol.
Preston Van Loon, Co-Founder of Prysmatic Labs
Preston Van Loon co-founded Ethereum-focused infrastructure company Prysmatic Labs in 2018, working alongside Raul Jordan. Van Loon previously worked at Google.
Van Loon’s company is working to develop Prysm, the most popular of the four main consensus client applications used to implement PoS. Prysmatic began focusing on a scaling solution called sharding, which will be an expected upgrade after The Merge happens.
Ben Edgington, Teku Product Lead at ConsenSys
Ben Edgington is the founder and product manager for open source consensus customer Teku.
Edgington focused its efforts on scaling Ethereum and PoS in early 2018. That same year, he began developing the Teku consensus client. Edgington is fascinated by Ethereum but is concerned about the environmental harm of PoW.
Mikhail Kalinin, Principal Researcher at ConsenSys R&D
He is currently the principal researcher at ConsenSys. Kalinin is one of the oldest developers working on Ethereum. Kalinin began working on an Ethereum client in 2015 before the mainnet launched.
Kalinin contributed to a number of important technical steps in the implementation of The Merge. In a recent tweet, Tim Beiko cited Kalinin along with Danny Ryan as two key figures in The Merge. In that blog post, Kalinin called his experience of The Merge an example of true diversification and decentralization of work in an R&D project.
