Kategorie: Ethereum News

Ethereum news about the ETH blockchain and its crypto ecosystem.

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Ethereum to launch “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet on Feb. 1

  • The “Zhejiang” public withdrawal testnet will then be followed by the Shanghai testnet.
  • This is the first major upgrade since the Merge upgrade.
  • The “Zhejiang” allows tools to test how to collect and display ETH withdrawal information.

Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi has confirmed via a Twitter post that the “Zhejiang” public testnet will be going live tomorrow (February 1, 15:00 UTC, 2023). The “Zhejiang” testnet will then be followed by the much-awaited Shanghai and Capella testnets.

Both the Shanghai and Capella testnets are scheduled to be triggered at epoch 1350.

Jayanthi was replying to another post by one, Barnabas Busa, who besides saying the testnet will go live tomorrow, said:

“Shanghai+Capella will be triggered 6 days later (at epoch 1350). You will be able to deposit validators, practice BLS change and exit without risk.”

In follow-up tweets, Jayanthi said:

“This is also a great opportunity for all tools to test out how they want to collect, display and use the withdrawal information. You can attempt to convert 0x00 credentials to 0x01 and set a withdrawal address. You can test partial withdrawals and full withdrawals by exiting your validator.”

Shanghai upgrade

The Shanghai and Capella upgrade testnets are expected to go live six days after the “Zhejiang” testnet, which will also feature all Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs) like timestamp-based forking that will come with the Shanghai upgrade.

The Shanghai upgrade is designed to allow ETH users to withdraw their Ether tokens plus rewards. Ether holders have been able to stake ETH since the Merge upgrade that moved the Ethereum blockchain from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain. However, the staked funds remain locked, pending a new upgrade the Shanghai.

Ethereum Foundation is targeting March 2023 for the Shanghai upgrade. After the Shanghai upgrade, Ethereum developers will turn their eyes to the EIP-4844 upgrade which is scheduled for May or June this year.

The EIP-4844 upgrade aims at increasing the scalability of layer-2 rollups on Ethereum by more than 100 times and also lower transaction fees.

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Oracle platform Pyth Network expands features to Arbitrum

  • Pyth Network’s price feeds are now available on Arbitrum.
  • Builders within the Ethereum scaling solution’s ecosystem can now tap into over 200 price feeds across crypto, equities and commodities.
  • The Pyth technology is already powering CAP Finance and Perpy Finance on Arbitrum.

Pyth Network, an oracle solution provider that’s mainly integrated across the Solana ecosystem, has announced expansion onto layer-2 blockchain protocol Arbitrum.

What this means is that the Pyth price feeds are now live on Arbitrum, a scaling solution developedby OffChain Labs for the Ethereum ecosystem. The Pyth team noted in a blog release on Tuesday that integration will support the decentralised finance (DeFi) community on Arbitrum.

Pyth to power Arbitrum dApps

Arbitrum already integrates with Chainlink price feeds. Basically, developers and other Arbitrum users now also have access a new oracle network with over 200 price feeds, covering major data needs across cryptocurrency, equities, FX pairs and commodities.

Mike Cahill, the Director of the Pyth Data Association, said that the integration with Arbitrum is significant. One of the reasons, he noted in a statement, is down to the fact that Pyth’s technology now powers decentralised applications (dApps) in the Ethereum ecosystem – the most prominent smart contracts blockchains today.

 “We’re excited to continue our expansion in the Ethereum world, and specifically the Arbitrum ecosystem as we continue to equip developers with high-quality data and enable a wide range of new dApps that are powered by Pyth,” Cahill added.

By bringing off-chain data in real time onto Arbitrum, Pyth is helping unlock previously inaccessible financial data for developers in this ecosystem.

As announced on Tuesday, Pyth’s price feeds already power Arbitrum-based perpetual DEX platform CAP Finance and decentralised copy trading protocol Perpy Finance.

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Institutional investors are increasingly bullish on Ethereum: report

  • 60% of respondents are convinced Ethereum will a better investment in 2023. 
  • Bitcoin is also seen as one with huge potential, while other coins attracting institutional investors are Polkadot, Cardano and XRP.
  • Speculative interest and exposure to distributed ledger technology are main reasons for increased interest.

Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with its market worth nearly $190 billion. 

While it remains behind Bitcoin, whose market cap as of 27 January 2023 stood at over $482 billion, institutional investors are reportedly more bullish on the cryptocurrency’s prospects in 2023 than was the case going into the third quarter last year.

60% of institutional investors are bullish on Ethereum

According to the latest survey results published by digital assets manager CoinShares, bullish sentiment around the top altcoin by institutional investors has increased by 20% since the last survey in October 2022.

The asset manager’s report states that 60% of respondents from major wealth majors, family offices, hedge funds and financial advisors, believe Ethereum has a better growth outlook in 2023. In October, when CoinShares published its previous Digital Asset Quarterly Fund Manager Survey, 40% of respondents had indicated a bullish outlook for the leading smart contracts platform.

Comparatively, 30% of the survey participants were bullish on Bitcoin – down from 40% in the previous report. But while most of the big money is betting on ETH, CoinShares highlighted that a growing number of investors are invested in both assets.

Other digital assets that institutional investors are eyeing in 2023 are Polkadot, Cardano, XRP, Solana and Polygon.

Why are institutional investors adding crypto to portfolios?

According to CoinShares, the main reasons behind increased interest and investment in digital assets are speculation and the need to gain exposure to opportunities across the distributed ledger technology ecosystem. 

Notably, more clients saw the recent crypto crash (after the collapse of FTX) as an opportunity, with a growing number directing fund managers to add crypto to their positions. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most popular.

But the asset manager says crypto’s increased correlation to equities might be the reason fewer investors cite diversification as a key factor.

“When asked what reasons prevented investors from investing in digital assets, it is interesting to note that reputational risk saw a significant decline while regulation is still an important consideration,” CoinShares noted.

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Aave holders approve AAVE V3 upgrade on Ethereum

  • Aave holders approve major technical upgrade dubbed Aave Ethereum V3.
  • The vote results showed a total of 706,258 AAVE, or 100% support.
  • Aave Ethereum V3 is set for activation following the governance vote.

The Aave community has approved an Aave Improvement Proposal (AIP), a governance proposal seeking to activate Aave V3 on the Ethereum network. 

A total of 706,258 AAVE was staked as 100% of the vote supported the technical upgrade, which will also list WBTC, WETH, wstETH, USD Coin (USDC), DAI, LINK, and AAVE. The community had already pre-approved the tokens.

“The community has spoken and we have the light to deploy Aave Protocol V3 on Ethereum Mainnet. More details to come tomorrow,” the Aave team tweeted.

The proposal was created on 22 January 2023, while voting started a day later and ended on 26 January 2023 at 05:48 UTC +03:00 (Block height 16488207). Currently, the proposal is shown as “queued” on the Aave website, with details that this can be executed within 12 hours.

Aave V3 already deployed on other major chains

Aave V3 is a highly anticipated upgrade set for the Ethereum mainnet,with the improvement proposal following the decision to have V3 deployed afresh instead of a software update to the existing V2 pool.

Notably, AAVE V3 is already live on various major networks, having deployed in March on 2022 on Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism and Polygon. But while V3 introduced architecture flexibility and improved composability, the same features did not go live on Aave’s largest market.

Currently, Ethereum accounts for over $5 billion in total value locked (TVL) on Aave’s V2 protocol.

The upcoming upgrade will increase compatibility across V3 pools and reduce general complexity, the AIP read.

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Why is Ethereum being outperformed by Bitcoin? Historical pattern changing in 2023


Key Takeaways

  • Ethereum has historically outperformed Bitcoin in bull runs
  • The pattern has flipped to start the year, with Bitcoin dominance rising 
  • Our Analyst Dan Ashmore jumps on-chain to look through history, and show how and why the pattern is changing

The Flippening, huh? Nothing incites debate within crypto circles quite like it. 

Referring to a scenario where Ethereum flips Bitcoin for the number one spot in the cryptocurrency ranks, the Flippening is anything from inevitable to delusional, depending on who you ask. 

I’m not sure I want to walk across the eggshells of that debate, for fear of my Twitter DMs, but I noticed something pretty interesting today when digging into the data on Ethereum vs Bitcoin. 

Ethereum is strongly correlated with Bitcoin

Firstly, the obvious. Ethereum is incredibly correlated with Bitcoin because, well, it is a cryptocurrency, and every crypto’s fate is tied to that of the orange coin. We know this by now. 

The graph below shows how tight this relationship has been since Ethereum went live back in 2015. 

But while these two best buddies follow each other around across the price charts, there are scenarios where they diverge a little bit. The famous ETH/BTC ratio is one which Ether fans in particular keep a keen eye on. 

It peaked in June 2017 at close to 0.15 before freefalling down to 0.025 before the end of the year. Today, it trades at around 0.07. 

Ether is better at bull markets than Bitcoin

You may have noticed that the previous ETH/BTC chart resembled the shape of the crypto market overall, through its many ups and downs. 

I plotted the price of Bitcoin against this ETH/BTC ratio. Indeed, the ratio rises as Bitcoin rises, and falls and Bitcoin falls. Using the Bitcoin price as a proxy for the whole industry, this suggests that the ETH/BTC ratio rises in bull markets and falls in bear markets. 

This makes sense. Bitcoin is often referred to as the boomer coin. I quite like it that way, despite it being meant as an insult, by the way. But it’s an understandable moniker because Bitcoin does move like a pensioner during bull markets when compared to altcoins. 

Ether may be the largest of the altcoins, but it still outperforms Bitcoin when the bulls are out to play. 

On the flip side, Bitcoin outperforms when the party ends. And by outperform, I mean that it tends to drop 60% as opposed to 70%. But hey, that’s for another day.

Pattern has flipped in 2023

But the price charts are showing something different. One month into the new year, Bitcoin has surged while the ETH/BTC ratio has fallen – precisely the opposite of what has happened historically. 

I charted the ratio back to the start of November, when Sam Bankman-Fried’s fun and games were revealed to the world and crypto fell, with Bitcoin cratering down to $16,000. 

The chart shows that the pattern remained as you would expect, i.e. the ratio fell as crypto and Bitcoin pulled back. But as we turned the page into 2023, the crypto market flipped and Bitcoin soared. Only problem is, ETH didn’t follow, but rather the ratio has fallen, from 0.077 on January 11th to 0.068 currently, despite Bitcoin spiking from $17,400 to close to $23,000 over the same period. 

Why? Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s unusual. 

Bitcoin is up 36% on the year whereas Ether is only up 29%. Yet looking at the returns of other altcoins, perhaps it is nothing to do with Ether. Many are being outperformed by Bitcoin, while even the outperformers are not doing so by as much as has been seen previously (note I have removed Solana for scale purposes, which is up 125% thus far this year, following being decimated by links to Sam Bankman-Fried and multiple projects fleeing the blockchain at the end of last year). 

In truth, this has just been a remarkable rise for Bitcoin from the depths of bear market pain. The rest of the market is not quite ready to forget the armageddon that was 2022, with many altcoins paring down over 90%. 

Ethereum wasn’t quite as bad, but still fell from an all-time high of nearly $5,000. The free money and stimulus packages of the pandemic are over. It is a different climate now, and it is proving more challenging to kick up hype for altcoins. 

The web3 narrative has faltered. NFTs have been crushed. There is no doubt that the narrative around ETH has been torn down. I have written about how institutional adoption will pare back in crypto, and how the sector’s reputation will take a long time to fix.

That is true for Bitcoin. Perhaps it rings even more true for ETH and altcoins, which have even more to do to regain investors’ trust. 

The post Why is Ethereum being outperformed by Bitcoin? Historical pattern changing in 2023 appeared first on CoinJournal.