Purchases of Ethereum Continue Ahead of Landmark Merge

Ethereum has just reached the record 10th week of the price drops as red covers the entire cryptocurrency market.

Despite the price drops, figures from data science startup IntoTheBlock revealed that Ethereum whales and investors are viewing the current circumstances as a perfect buying opportunity.

Someone is Buying the Pain

The balance of Ether addresses climbed by 3.35% over the last month. These addresses were reported holding between 0.01-0.1 Ether.

Retail accumulation of the addresses holding between 1-10 Ether and 10-100 Ether has also been on the rise for 6 months, according to datafeeds by Santiment.

The long-awaited transition Merge has gained traction since the announcement of its release. And, with the Ethereum Merge approaching, many people don’t want to be late for the party.

What, yet again, makes the Merge so anticipated?

The Merge Changes The Game

The Merge marks Ethereum’s major upgrade, transitioning from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Once the upgrade is complete, the execution layer and consensus layer will be merged.

The result is an Ethereum network with high scalability, security, and stability. This is expected to be a breakthrough in the development journey of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Following the Merge (phase 0), the team will continue their work on the implementation of shard chains.

Improvements in Sharding technology will help reduce the amount of hardware required for the Ethereum chain, making it faster and more scalable while retaining some of its inherent security capabilities.

As a result, miners will no longer be able to mine ETH, but will instead have to stake ETH into validators in order to acquire ETH. Since the plan’s implementation, a number of upgrades have been performed.

Work on the serenity phase has been ongoing since January 2020, with the primary goal of reducing the occurrence and intensity of network congestion while also addressing the continued problem given by the PoW mechanism’s proclivity for excessive energy consumption.

The Delay: As Expected

On June 8, the Ethereum developer’s team announced that the new upgrade of the Merge was successfully deployed on the Ropsten testnet. The good news marked one step closer to the goal of merging two blockchains and the major transition from mining to staking.

The Merge was supposed to take place in early August, according to the earlier statement. Despite the fud associated with stETH (ETH staking on the Lido protocol) and issues with the Celisus lending platform, which plainly has an impact on Ethereum’s recent performance, many investors remain positive.

However, the most recent news from the core team may be discouraging to the community.

After Beacon Chain and Ropsten both identified difficulties in early June, the Ethereum development team decided to postpone the difficulty bomb until mid-August 2022 in order to have more time to study the system and discover new solutions for potential vulnerabilities.

“In short, we agreed to the bomb delay. We were already over time, and want to be sure that we sanity check all the numbers before selecting an exact delay and deployment time, but we are aiming for a ~2-month delay, and for the upgrade to go live in late June,” according to Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko and the team.

The “difficulty bomb” is a critical component of the network that was coded in 2016, when The Merge idea to construct Ethereum 2.0 arose.

According to some estimations, the switch to PoS will lower the Ethereum network’s energy requirement by up to 99.9%.

Furthermore, when compared to networks using the PoW consensus approach, other PoS networks, such as Polygon and Fantom Opera, have low power requirements.

While Beiko did not mention The Merge in his recent post, delaying the difficulty bomb could cause further delays for the event, which is scheduled for August 2022.

So far, no specific date for Merge’s release has been provided.