# GBC welcome twitter thread Gnosis chain (formerly xDAI) is doing a beacon chain merge, and.. ..I’ll be the merge coordinator! 🔥🔥 Super proud and excited! but, what’s next? 🧵 Thread below 👇 ------ Quick refresher: Gnosis beacon chain (GBC) launched in Dec 8, 2021 and will merge with the EVM chain Gnosis (formerly xDAI) 🐼👉👈🐼 Same as Ethereum but going from PoA (Aura) to PoS instead of PoW to PoS ------ Humbled the Gnosis chain team entrusted me with this task and with my experience as a core dev at Ethereum I'll ensure a safe and timely merge 💯 ------ Why focus on Gnosis chain now? ✊ Bold to be first on adopting Ethereum's beacon chain design ⭐️ Uphold Ethereum values since their OG beginnings 🛠️ Key testing ground for current and future beacon chain features ------ I've you have been sleeping on GBC: There's almost 100,000 validators active as of today, With significant portion of solo stakers. Home stakers are directly incentivized via sponsored purchases of hardware 🤯 via @DAppNode ------ So what is a merge coordinator? I'll guide the testing effort with talented Gnosis devops, coordinate with EL and CL teams and front the communications here in crypto twitter ------ What about my other responsibilities? I'm currently leading Lodestar @ChainSafeth and I'll continue to do that fully. The next months are so exciting! (audit + v1.0.0 + LIDO 👀🔥) However, I'll pause my role at DAppNode to focus on merge summer #MergeSummer > #L222 ------ So, what's the plan? 🧐 A lot of excellent work has already been done by all the teams. We'll expand on that with merge devnets and shadow-forks specific for PoA to PoS merges. Follow me for devnet announcements! ------ Who's participating? With OpenEthereum deprecated (RIP 🙏) Nethermind will be the sole-merge capable client. Rest of EL clients will be added post-merge. One the CL side, we have good diversity already ------ Wen merge sir? ⌛️ TLDR; 👉 TBD Once Ethereum signals the merge is safe + we are confident about Nethermind's AuRa-specific components _Protocol must be safu_ ------ If you made it this far, you rock 💕 Follow me and @gnosischain for announcements and progress updates as we go into #TheMerge