Cryptocurrency exchange FTX has announced that it shall temporarily freeze trading Ether (ETH) on several blockchains as the Ethereum Merge nears.

The halt will last until The Merge is completed as a way of taking extra precautionary measures to safeguard investors’ funds during the Ethereum upgrade.

After the Merge, Ethereum blockchain will gradually switch from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

FTX said:

“As the ETH merge approaches, FTX will temporarily disable blockchain transfers of secondary chains for ETH to make sure that settlement is clean; the main chain ETH will stay active for longer.”

FTX’s move comes despite Ethereum developers’ assurance that the Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) is what will allow the Merge to switch to PoS with no downtime. TTD will enable the transition based on the total mining power that will go into generating the new chain.

The Merge will not lower gas prices

Depsite switching from PoW, which is considered more costly, to PoS, which is considered to be cheaper, the Ethereum Foundation has stated that the Merge will not result to a reduction of gas prices.

An announcement from Ethereum Foundation reads:

“Gas fees are a product of network demand relative to the network’s capacity. The Merge deprecates the use of Proof-of-Work, transitioning to Proof-of-Stake for consensus, but does not significantly change any parameters that directly influence network capacity or throughout.”