The long-awaited Ethereum Merge – the landmark protocol upgrade for the world’s second largest cryptocurrency – completed at approximately 07:45 British Standard Time.
While it will take time to flesh out how the markets will react, so far The Merge seems successful.
At the time of writing, ETH is changing hands at US$1,600, largely unchanged over the past 24 hours.
And we finalized!Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022
In the lead up to The Merge, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reassured traders that it should have no real effect on prices, so no news is absolutely good news in this instance.
Now officially a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, Ethereum is over 99% more energy efficient and is on the road to significantly increasing its scalability and network speed.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, head of the world’s largest digital asset exchange Binance, Tweeted that The Merge was “successful”.
Merge successful. POS activated.We are all still here.
— CZ ???? Binance (@cz_binance) September 15, 2022
Famed digital artist Beeple is joining in the fun with a fresh NFT.
THE MERGE pic.twitter.com/7tdfNZiuuv— beeple (@beeple) September 15, 2022
As for Bitcoin, once again the US$20,000 price point has proved itself as a strong support line, with the bulls managing to stabilise the cryptocurrency after yesterday’s rout.
Without a strong catalyst, we should expect Bitcoin to trade fairly sideways for the rest of the week.
The large-cap altcoins are seeing a bit of a lift post-Merge, with Solana and Cardano heading into the green and Polygon, Tron and Avalanche seeing incremental gains.
The wider market
Both Terras – that is Terra LUNA and Terra Classic (LUNC) – continue to spiral to the floor with heavy double-digital losses once again.
Other poor performers today include Cosmos (ATOM) and Helium (HNT).
Some negative price action in the decentralised finance (DeFi) market, with Lido, Synthetix and Curve all dipping.
Celsius (CEL) is back at it having doubled ita market cap in the past 24 hours.
The native token of insolvent crypto lender Celsius Network is being held up by the #CelShortSqueeze Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) campaign.