Ethereum, the world’s second most capitalised cryptocurrency appreciated by 3.87% on Tuesday despite the uncertainty surrounding the Ethereum planned merge later this month.
Ethereum is scheduled to undergo a merge that would reshape the future of the digital asset from a project powered by miners through a process known as Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) which is widely presumed to consume lower energy and subsequently, lower gas fees.
With $198.971 billion market capitalisation and 400 decentralised applications, the world’s largest protocol could be exposed to certain level of risks not anticipated in its planning stage given its current size. Therefore, investors and traders of Ethereum are generally expected to be cutting down on their exposure or holding by now ahead of September 15 planned merge.
However, on Tuesday the price of the token started appreciating. Suggesting that many retail traders looking to take advantage of the Ethereum merge have started increasing their holdings, a situation that could hurt their pockets and entire portfolio if the merge goes wrong.
Year-to-date, Ethereum has lost 54.77% of its value. However, in the last 24 hours, the coin gained $56.33 to $1,608.83 a coin.
Investors transacted Ethereum worth $2.62 billion in 1.09 million deals in the last 24 hours while the average fee paid per transaction was $1.94.
Since its inception, it has risen to an all-time high of $4,865.57 before plunging to as low as $880.93 a coin when the Luna-triggered bearish trend commenced. The total Ethereum supplied to date is 119.64 million.
Commenting on the Ethereum merge, the CEO of Bitcoin White Rock, Andy Long, said the Ethereum merge will force existing Ethereum PoW miners to seek other coins still operating with PoW to protect their investments.
“Hash rate will flow to alternative GPU PoW coins, and many miners will simply give up and try to sell off their farms of cards,” he said.
“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,” he added.
