Ethereum [ETH] Merge on Beacon Chain will release in the next few days. The event has affected the larger crypto community for a long time. The anticipation surrounding the merge has led to high activity around Ethereum on social platforms.
recently TweetSantiment claimed that “social interest in the merge has increased over time as major spikes coincide with a drop in prices”.
The imminent release of the merge put Ethereum as the top coin by social contributors last week. Lunarcrush recently claimed this Tweet Which drives the case for Ethereum’s social activity of late.
This also puts Ethereum ahead of other crypto assets, such as Cardano (the issuer of the Vasil fork), Bitcoin. [BTC]and others.
With the FOMC meeting scheduled for next week, traders are expected to experience volatility. However, Ethereum is already experiencing a price rally as it is down 2.2% on the daily chart. At press time, ETH is trading at $1,715, having previously lost the $1,700 support.
merge week
A recent research study by Kaiko talks about important events during this important merge week. First, the study discussed the changing pattern of BTC and ETH perpetual futures funding rates over the weekend.
“As the BTC funding rate flipped positive, the ETH funding rate fell to its most negative since July 2021.”
This gap is claimed to be mainly influenced by the upcoming Ethereum merge. This has caused investors to hedge their exposure exposure to ETH by going short perpetual futures. This is why ETH funding rates have been negative for over a month now.
The study also observed a trend reversal in the three biggest staking Ether tokens: stETH from Lido, cbETH from Coinbase, and bETH from Binance. There appears to be a “significant discount” for these tokens on their respective exchanges.
According to Kaiko, cbETH is the “heaviest discount” of the three. However, it has managed to show an increase from 0.915 to above 0.94 as of 12 September. For the other two, we can see an improvement in discounts.
This puts Ethereum in a very strong position as it approaches the merge this week. However, the fall in prices today (September 13) suggests that traders need to be cautious in terms of risk exposure to this event.