The market has seen an increase in the last 24 hours. Ethereum gained 8.13%, while the market king, Bitcoin, gained 3.25%. The performance of the rest of the top cryptocurrencies has been on par with the performance of the two large companies.
ETH/USD has experienced significant volatility over the past 24 hours, with a price range of $1,362.95 to $1,602.61. While the total market capitalization is around $181.33 billion, trading volume declined by 14.18% to $17.13 billion, leading to a market dominance of 18.3%.
Ethereum got a shock ahead of the merger
Ether (ETH) is down 11.5% over the past seven days, even after the recent confirmation of the “Ethereum Merge” changes to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus network in September.
Ethereum Core developer Tim Beiko suggested 19 July as a possible target date in the Ethereum Core Developers Conference call of 14 July.
Years have passed since the move away from energy-intensive mining, and no date has yet been set for a shift to scalability using sharding technology, which allows parallel processing. However, other analysts are predicting that the network’s monetary policy will increase the value of Ether.
ETH/USD trades at $1,600. Source: TradingView
Ethereum researcher Vivek Raman noted the “supply shock” effect. According to the analyst, the “merge” will “reduce the total supply of ETH by 90%,” even if there is no longer a reduction in transaction fees.
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The recent dramatic decrease in the price of Ether can be attributed largely to regulatory uncertainty. Era Labs is the target of a class-action lawsuit seeking to “unfairly induce” the public to buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Apcoin (APE) tokens. The law firm further claims that Era Labs “inflates the price” of BAYC NFT and APE tokens by using celebrity endorsers and promoters.
shadow fork positioned
Another small but significant step has been taken by Ethereum towards the merger and the much anticipated Switch Off Stake of the blockchain.
Ethereum’s 10th Shadow Split, which was supposed to go live today, went online more than 26 hours ago yesterday. Shadow forks are a focused test run of Merge’s components; They simulate making one or two special modifications to the future blockchain.
This is different from the full testnet hard forks, such as the Sepulia testnet that happened earlier this month. The merger, which turns the entire Ethereum mainnet into a test environment network, is fully rehearsed on the testnet.
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This week’s shadow fork served as a rehearsal for the August 11 release on Ethereum’s final testnet, Goerly. This trial will be the third and final of its kind before the merge is ready to take effect.
Featured image from iStock Photo, charts from TradingView.com