The Ethereum Merge is Complete, Proof-of-Stake is live, Eth Price Down
- Ethereum price is trading at $2,291.62, down approximately 1.5 percent in the past 24 hours.
- With the ETH mining industry down onwards, the logistics of anyone validating Ethereum transactions are achievable.
- The Merge has set the stage for further scalability upgrades that were not possible under the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus.
The Ethereum (ETH) network is now fully secured by the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. The Paris upgrade, the last hurdle toward the Merge, clocked at a Total Terminal Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000. The beacon chain is currently running with thousands of validators who have staked over 14 million ETH.
Following the Merge upgrade, the Ethereum network is out of regulators’ radar on electricity consumption. Reportedly, the Ethereum ecosystem was consuming approximately 0.2 percent of the world’s produced electricity. However, the upgrade has helped reduce the cryptocurrency carbon footprint, which is a mission by most countries.
What Next After the Ethereum Merge
According to our market data, Ethereum’s price is trading at $2,291.62, down approximately 1.5 percent in the past 24 hours. The entire crypto market capitalization is at around $1.03 trillion, down approximately 1 percent.
Despite the cryptocurrency market trending downwards, it has been reported that institutional investors are flooding the industry.
“Despite short-term cycles, momentum in institutional adoption is trending one way – toward more exploration and more interest,” said Greg Tusar, Vice President of Institutional Products at Coinbase.
However, the effects of the Merge may likely materialize in the coming months. Furthermore, the cryptocurrency bull markets in the past have taken place a year after the Bitcoin halving.
The onset of the Merge has far-reaching effects on the entire crypto market, particularly on investors. Remember, the Merge has been in preparation for the past six years, with several postponements in the past. As a hard fork, all the shareholders had to come to a common agreement, thereby making it a major event.
With the ETH mining industry down onwards, the logistics of anyone validating Ethereum transactions are achievable. Moreover, it only takes 32 units of ETH for one to become a full node validator.
Having proved that decentralized networks can coordinate a major hard fork seamlessly, more institutional investors are likely to hop on the crypto wagon onwards.
The Merge has set the stage for further scalability upgrades that were not possible under the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus. Consequently, the Ethereum network is one step closer to achieving the full-scale, security and sustainability mission.
There is a line of upgrades set up after a successful ETH Merge. Furthermore, the Merge upgrade did not include certain anticipated features such as the ability to withdraw staked ETH. Consequently, the Shanghai upgrade is planned to follow after the Merge, which will enable the validators to withdraw staked assets.
The other major update which is under contention due to the existence of layer 2 rollups is the Sharding upgrade. Reportedly, the sharding upgrade is expected to happen sometime later in 2023. Notably, Sharding is the process of splitting a database horizontally to spread the load on a blockchain.