Hours after midnight Thursday, Ethereum, the second-biggest blockchain network, successfully completed its Merge upgrade.

Lauded by both supporters and critics as crypto’s most ambitious software upgrade, the change shifted how Ethereum processes transactions — from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake — a first in the world of blockchains.

The upgrade caused Ethereum's energy consumption to plummet, with proponents saying the move also had to be finished before upgrading it to be a faster, cheaper and more useful financial layer for the internet.

Other analysts expect the change will enhance the financial prospects for the protocol’s native cryptocurrency, (ETH-USD) ether. But within the hour before the Merge, Ethereum’s native token slipped below $1,600 per coin and was trading relatively unchanged at $1,501 per coin by Thursday 2 p.m., down more than 5%. After logging record gains for investors last year, the asset is trading 58% lower since January 1.

The ether to bitcoin (ETH-BTC) ratio also seen a 5% drop following the Merge.

In the coming days and weeks, Ethereum developers will be watching for any significant problems, but "so far so good," Adam Levine, a crypto investor and early podcaster in the space, told Yahoo Finance.

The move to proof of stake has been contemplated as far back as 2014 by the protocol’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin - more than a year before Ethereum was launched.

The upgrade's final stage took about 12 minutes followed by another 12-15 minutes for Ethereum’s core developer team to gauge the transition's "finality" with as many as 41,000 people watching during a live Merge “viewing party."

By eliminating mining, the Ethereum Foundation and other analysts projected the protocol's energy consumption — which had required as much power as a small country — would drop by 99.95%. Justin Drake, an Ethereum researcher said just before the upgrade that the Merge “will reduce worldwide electricity consumption by 0.2%."

According to Nansen, within the hour after the upgrade, participation of network validators in the new version of the protocol averaged 98% — smoother than what most experts anticipated — with the figure rising since then. For reference, Ethereum needed at least a 66% validator participation to continue processing transactions.