less than 24 hours Ethereum (ETH) is undergoing its long-awaited merger, with the price of the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap hardly making any noise.
As data from CoinMarketCap shows, ETH is down 0.27% in the last day, trading just over $1,600 at press time.
The asset hit a daily high of $1,626 in the early hours of Wednesday, and dropped to $1,564 in the past 24 hours as trading volume fell from $23 billion to $20 billion in the past 24 hours.
Ethereum is still up nearly 4% on the seven-day chart, as it prepares to transition from its current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a less energy-hungry one. proof-of-stake (POS) system.
Merge: What to Expect
“There are some misconceptions among the broader public about what kind of benefits the merger is going to bring,” said Henry Elder, head of DeFi at digital asset management firm Wave Financial. decrypt, “It’s not going to make Ethereum faster, more scalable, and cheaper. It’s just Ethereum going from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.”
According to Elder, the biggest benefit of the merge is “perhaps, a 99.96% reduction in power usage, but there isn’t going to be any difference in their experience for 99.96% of users.”
Weak trading activity prior to the merger could be a sign of investor caution ahead of the event. It also mirrors the decline in the broader crypto market following the release of the latest US Consumer Price Index (CPI) on Tuesday, which showed higher-than-expected inflation data.
During the merger, most trading platforms will temporarily suspend new deposits and withdrawals on the Ethereum mainnet. America’s Largest Crypto Exchange, Coinbase, Will Freeze Activity On It Too polygon (MATIC) and optimism series, as well as ERC-20 token