The Ethereum Merge and How it Affects GoChain

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GoChain

4 min readAug 23, 2022

Ethereum is switching to Proof of Stake in what is called the Ethereum Merge. The goal is to reduce their environmental impact which is notoriously bad and consumes a significant percent of the world’s electricity. It is also supposed to lay the groundwork for future scaling and lower fees, but scaling and lower fees will not happen immediately. The fees will still be high and it will still be slow until future upgrades in 2023 and beyond.

GoChain has always been green. We started green and we continue to be one of the cleanest blockchains around.

GoChain already has very low fees. GoChain fees are a fraction of a penny vs dollars or tens of dollars on Ethereum. GoChain is at least 100x cheaper even on the cheapest day on Ethereum, 1000x cheaper on an average day and 10,000x cheaper on a bad day.

GoChain is already scalable, 100x more scalable than Ethereum.

You can use GoChain as an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain (L2) by using the GoChain bridge at chainswap.org to transfer tokens to GoChain and back to Ethereum, to take advantage of the super low fees and scalability of GoChain.

Of course, if you want to be end-to-end sustainable you can use GoChain as your layer 1 chain and deploy your smart contracts on GoChain from the start.

How GoChain Solved the Issues Ethereum 2.0 is Supposed to Solve

GoChain was started over 4 years ago to solve these very issues. It’s literally the reason it exists. The original goals of GoChain was to be:

100x faster — handle 100x the volume of Ethereum, hence the 1300 transactions per second target vs Ethereum’s 13
1000x cheaper — Instead of dollars for transactions, GoChain has always been sub-penny
10,000x greener — our unique Proof of Reputation consensus paved the way for this, and GoChain is actually closer to 10,000,000x greener

So what Ethereum is finally starting to do now, in 2022, we did 4 years ago when our mainnet went live in May 2018.

Proof of Reputation

GoChain’s unique Proof of Reputation consensus is really what makes GoChain special. Instead of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake which are the most common in today’s blockchains, we came up with our own consensus protocol to help us achieve our goals.

Proof of Reputation works by having highly reputable organizations around the globe running the nodes on the network. These organizations wouldn’t dare risk their brands/reputations by trying to compromise the network. This is in stark contrast to the anonymous miners and the 4 major mining companies that control 80% of Bitcoin and Ethereum that nobody knows much about.

GoChain nodes are well known brands that you know and trust, such as:

Penn State University
RMIT University
Lenovo
Dish Network
Conservation International
Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
And many other great organizations

Having this amazing group run the network provides the following benefits that no other blockchain network can claim.

Trusted

You know and trust who’s running the network, unlike every other blockchain network out there. Not only should this give you peace of mind, but if you’re a company that doesn’t want to associate with bad actors, GoChain is your best blockchain choice.

Secure

The main way to attack a blockchain is called a 51% attack. In order to pull it off, the attackers must gain control of more than 50% of a blockchain network’s nodes. This has happened on several Proof of Work blockchains. In order for this attack to work on GoChain, you would have to hack into more than half of our node operator’s data centers at the same time. It’s hard enough to do this to one organization, let alone a dozen.

The other way this could be done is if more than half of those organizations decided to collude together to attack the network. This would just never happen. The organizations have so much to lose and so little to gain by doing so.

Sustainable

By having a group of organizations run the nodes and the fact they aren’t battling each other over a very wasteful hash battle to win a block, the GoChain blockchain uses millions of times less energy than Bitcoin or Ethereum.

If your company has ESG mandates, GoChain is the blockchain for you.

Not only does it sip electricity, you are also supporting environmental non-profits such as Conversation International, Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and Fins Attached who all run a node for the GoChain network.

You can read the original concept behind Proof of Reputation in our 2018 article here.

What’s Next?

Our goal is to have 25 nodes by the end of 2022 and 35 by the end of 2023, adding more reputational quality to the network.

The more node organizations that join GoChain, the greater the security and trust of the network.

Also, each node is expected to turn into opportunities as part of the agreement to join the network is to build on and use GoChain for some part of their business or operations.