16 September 2023
It has been a year since the Merge took place, and as expected, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, has experienced many changes since then. What are some of them? Let’s take a look.
One Year In: How Has Ethereum Changed?
According to a prominent figure in the Ethereum community, Sassal, 980,000 ETH have been burned since Ethereum transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus to proof-of-stake (PoS).
Ahead of the Merge, Ethereum had implemented a significant upgrade known as the London hard fork. This introduced a fee-burning mechanism with transaction base fees being burned immediately after a transaction is processed.
This move was geared towards making Ether deflationary, considering that some tokens are removed permanently from circulation. Ethereum supply is down by 0.25% since the Merge took place.
Furthermore, the Merge resulted in the network being secured by validators who stake their ETH as against Miners, who were the backbone of the network under the PoW consensus. In line with this, over 11.6 million ETH (since the Merge) has been staked to secure the network and also earn passive income in return.
The top stakers include the staking platform Lido DAO which has a market share of 22.64%, according to data from Dune Analytics. Other top stakers include exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken.
Meanwhile, the number of validators on the network has significantly increased since the Merge, with 362,000 new validators joining the network.
Down In Valuation But Not Value
Ethereum’s price has increased by close to 11% from a year ago. However, many may consider this insignificant for a token that hit an all-time high of $4,891 the previous year. Nevertheless, there are positives to take from the Merge, as Ethereum has undoubtedly become more valuable since it occurred despite the current bear market woes.
A crypto analyst noted that ETH’s annual inflation rate has decreased since the Merge, and trading activity on Ethereum’s layer-2 chains has also increased significantly. That would suggest that more people are being onboarded into the Ethereum ecosystem.
According to him, Ethereum’s fundamentals are also at an all-time high, as there are factors that show that the ecosystem is stable and healthy. One of them happens to be the fact that traditional financial (TradFi) institutions are taking an interest in ETH.
Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently filed to offer an Ethereum Spot ETF (a first of its kind). This is alongside other institutions that have filed to offer an Ethereum futures ETF (of which ARK Invest happens to be among them).
Featured image from WAYA Media