The Ethereum Merge has successfully taken place after years of expectation, numerous testnets, and hours of media coverage.
The general assumption is that the transition of the blockchain’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism will go off without a hitch. Even so, everyone will undoubtedly be watching the Merge and gauging its performance.
Wednesday’s trading for bitcoin and ether was largely flat as the highly expected Ethereum Merge approached its conclusion. BTC and ETH both traded in a constrained price range.
During the initial minutes following the integration, the price of Ether increased by less than 1% to $1,605, then essentially remained unchanged throughout the Asia trading session.
In the two-week run-up to the Merge, the price of ether was up 4% but is down 15.5% on month according to market data.
Ethereum Classic’s cost is currently down 2% to $36.34.
Despite Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum being quoted as saying “not going to be priced in basically much until after it happens” on the Bankless podcast, traders seemed to disagree.
In the minutes before the incident, 88% of ether nodes were Merge ready and synched, according to EtherNodes.
A total of 305 nodes, or 12% of the network, showed signs of resistance to the switch, the most coming from the Geth network.
Despite that the Merge had no effect on the price of ether, on-chain data indicates that $1.2 billion was infused into exchanges
There isn’t yet agreement, but steep exchange inflow typically indicates traders getting ready to sell.
Anything from speculators hedging their bets to people getting ready to gather airdropped tokens from the EthereumPoW fork could be the cause.
A Shanghai-based partner at Bizantine Capital, March Zheng, told CoinDesk over WeChat, “If this had happened last year, we’d be around $8,000 right now.” The principles, though, couldn’t be any better.
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