Kategorie: Ethereum News

The Ethereum Bellatrix upgrade, which kicks off the final countdown for the much-anticipated Merge upgrade, is now live.

ETH price shot above $1,678 minutes after the Bellatrix upgrade was activated. At press time, ETH price had, however, dropped to $1,598.80 almost eroding the gains made after the Bellatrix upgrade.

The Bellatrix upgrade has added impetus to the recovering Ether that had previously been struggling amid strong bearish headwinds.

What is the Bellatrix upgrade?

The Merge is a two-step process and the first step is the Bellatrix upgrade that was triggered by an epoch height. The second step is the Paris upgrade that will be triggered by the targeted Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) of 58750000000000000000000 expected to be reached between September 13^th and 15th.

Bellatrix is the last upgrade on Ethereum’s Beacon Chain before the Ethereum blockchain completely shifts from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (Pos). The Beacon Chain went live last year.

Currently, each Ethereum node is represented on two different layers, the main chain which is a proof-of-work layer and the C layer (consensus layer). The Merge is expected to combine these two layers and transition to a PoS-based blockchain.

Bellatrix upgrade will enable validators to start producing updated Beacon Blocks, which will then contain the codebase for the merging of the two layers.

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Ether is up by more than 6% in the last 24 hours as the Ethereum community gears for the upcoming Merge event.

ETH, the native coin of the Ethereum blockchain, is up by more than 6% in the last 24 hours. Thus, making it the best performer amongst the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Ether’s rally comes as the broader crypto market has been performing well over the last 24 hours. The total market cap currently stands around $1 trillion, up by more than 2% today.

Bitcoin continues to struggle to move past the $20k psychological level despite the broader crypto market performing well so far today. BTC has added more than 1% to its value in the last 24 hours.

Ether’s positive performance comes as the Ethereum community gets ready for the Merge event. The Merge event will see the Ethereum blockchain migrate from a proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS).

The Merge is slated to take place between September 10-20, meaning that it is only a few days away. The transition is designed to make the Ethereum network faster, more scalable, and reduce the cost of transactions.

Key levels to watch

The ETH/USD 4-hour chart is bullish as Ether has been performing really well over the past 24 hours. ETH’s positive performance is better than the other major cryptocurrencies.

The MACD line crossed into the positive zone yesterday, a shift from the bearish tone the market had taken in recent days. 

The 14-day RSI of 67 shows that ETH is heading towards the overbought region if the rally can be sustained.

At press time, ETH is trading at $1,670 per coin. If the bulls remain in charge ahead of the Merge, ETH could surge past the $1,782 resistance level over the next few hours or days.

In the event of an extended bullish run, ETH could cross the $2,000 psychological level for the first time this month. 

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Ethereum Merge is set to take place in a few days, and White Rock’s CEO believes it will lead to other coins experiencing an increase in miners.

The Ethereum network is set to transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus to a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism later this month. The move is designed to upgrade the Ethereum blockchain to make it faster, more scalable, and reduce the cost of transactions. 

However,  Andy Long, CEO of Bitcoin miner White Rock, told Cointelegraph in a recent interview that the transition is likely to flood the crypto industry with out-of-work ETH miners.

Long said Ethereum miners would be looking for greener pastures following the Merge event, and this will swamp other coins, increasing mining difficulty and reducing profitability. He added that;

“As GPU miners point their hardware at other chains, their difficulty will increase, causing lower returns and splitting the reward amongst more miners. Hashrate will flow to alternative GPU PoW coins, and many miners will simply give up and try to sell off their farms of cards.”

The CEO believes that the migration would likely force some cryptocurrency miners to give up and abandon their mining rigs.  He added that;

“Some miners will try to sell their High-Performance Computing (HPC) or GPU cloud services and will likely fail since there’s too much capacity chasing a limited amount of demand.”

In recent months, GPU prices have been declining, correlating with the decrease in the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. As a result, some companies are selling their rigs below the list price, while sellers who maintained the normal prices are struggling to offload mining rigs and cards. 

Despite the upcoming Merge, Long said he is interested in seeing how the market forces play out in the long term. He said;

“When I was building GPU farms in 2017, the Merge was cited as an imminent threat and would have been much more impactful then. There will always be GPUs mining some GPU optimized chains, but I doubt we will return to the levels of revenue seen in ETH proof-of-work at its peak ever again.”

Ethereum’s Merge event is slated to happen between September 10-20 and is considered one of the most significant upgrades in the cryptocurrency market in 2022. 

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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.”

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Ethereum blockchain has been working hard to migrate from the current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The process of moving from PoW to PoS is expected to culminate with the much-anticipated Merge upgrade.

In 2020 several testnents upgrades have been carried out all in readiness for the ultimate Merge upgrade. It started with the launch of the Beacon Chain which revived the hopes of a blockchain that could offer near-instant transactions.

After the final testnet Goerli went live successfully Ethereum developers anticipated that the Merge Upgrade would take place on September 15 going by the hashrate and the targeted total difficulty.

Target total difficulty for the Merge to take place

After several Ethereum developers hinted at September 15 as the date for the Ethereum Merge, Vitalik Buteirn came out to specify that the exact date would depend on the ETH hashrate since the total difficulty to be achieved had already been set at 58,75,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,000.

It was with respect to the set total difficulty and the average hashrate of 872.2 THs at the time that the date of September 15 was arrived at.

The total difficulty, however, currently stands at around 57,70,49,02,01,07,48,20,74,40,547 with the preparations for the Merge being 98.21% complete.

If the current hashrate is maintained and the Bellatrix update scheduled for September 06 2022 takes place without a hitch, then the Merge may be triggered well before the announced date of September 15.

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