With the definitive announcement of its launch date, the long-awaited upgrade of the ETH network is expected to have important consequences for the protocol ecosystem and the entire crypto market.
It finally happened: The Merge, the Ethereum network upgrade that marks the first of five major phases of the protocol’s restructuring, was scheduled between the 15th and 16th of September.
The cryptocurrency market has been waiting for this date for months and reacting according to its proximity. During the past month, we have seen successive highs of ETH, which today reached $1,900 after inflationary changes in the US.
But then, what can we expect for the value of ether and the market?
New ETH and triple halving
With the successful merger of the Ethereum mainnet with Goerli, the protocol’s last and largest testnet, which took place yesterday (10), it was possible to safely determine the date to start the transition to Ethereum 2.0. In the Merge stage, the main feature is the change from the consensus mechanism, which is currently the Proof of Work (PoW), to Proof of Stake (PoS), which promises to bring more efficient energy consumption and greater scalability, in addition to safer, faster and cheaper transactions.
This change is causing disagreements in the Ethereum community, with several crypto miners wanting to create a new token, known until then as ETHPOW or ETHW.
The idea of making one more hard fork of Ethereum under the Proof of Work model — or at least not abandoning it entirely in favor of Proof of Stake — has support from important industry investors such as Chandler Guo and Justin Sun, and it was even listed on some exchanges.
Vitalik Buterin himself, one of the co-creators of the token, has already expressed his opinion about ETHPOW, stating that it is unlikely to receive wide adoption in the long term.
Another possible consequence for Ethereum is the triple halving, an economic phenomenon that is being predicted by several market experts. The decrease in ETH issuance would cause a deflationary effect that would greatly value not only the main token on the network, but also the other protocols that are within it and make use of the currency.
Therefore, we can safely reinforce the pricing of Ethereum being done by the market. The last few weeks have proved that ETH currently represents an investment with an excellent return not only in terms of money, but also for the protocol technology and its users, and for the other projects included in the network ecosystem.
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