Bitcoin is rising but ethereum is rising more with btc gaining just 0.56% today, while eth rose 2.27%.
This Monday bitcoin had a very green day, up 4%, but eth was greener still, gaining 6%.
Ethereum appears to be beating not just bitcoin, but also other tokens. Decentraland’s mana had a whole successful fashion week and gained about 5%, but eth still gained more.
We can see some of that in the ratio, up for much of this month to now 0.072 btc per eth, up some 28% in the past two days.
That’s while Do Kwon is buying billions worth of bitcoin, and MacroStrategy is now buying too some $200 million. Yet eth somehow rises more.
ConsenSys was buying some $450 million eth, so there’s big movements here too, but it may well be chiefly that the burning is starting to bite and the merger is getting near.
More than 2 million eth has been burned so far and ◊7,400, worth $25 million, was burned just today.
That’s huge numbers even now, but when the merger goes live at these levels some $20 million eth would be taken out of total circulation.
That’s a big deal because it will be the first time a top crypto shrinks in total supply, something that effectively translates to buybacks.
Just as companies use their profits to buy back publicly traded shares, the ethereum network will automatically take ‘profits’ from transaction fees charged and take it out of circulation.
Those ‘profits’ minus the ‘costs’ of less than 2,000 eth a day given to stakers as reward, leaves us the amount that is taken out of total supply and therefore amounts to a buyback.
No wonder thus worldwide Google searches for ‘ethereum merge’ have reached all time high, although they’re still minuscule compared to just ‘ethereum’ searches.
It may show a trend however that awareness is increasing of the event, and with March now almost over so very quickly, it is getting closer to the upgrade happening in potentially two months.
There’s no ‘official’ date of course as a block number has not been set, but things are going fine in the merge public testnet. They’re now upgrading long established testnets as well, like Goerli, although that’s a shadow fork so seems to be a bit messy.
They’re to upgrade the other testnets as well, with this all reaching the stage where a specific date is a lot less relevant than the fact there isn’t much left to be done but to live launch.
Which means this is ‘imminent’ in the Joe Biden use of ‘imminent.’ As in, requiring you to imminently get ready.
Where investors are concerned there isn’t anything to do except try price in, but exchanges, developers, and the whole ecosystem which actually does run something needs to get ready by testing, refining, checking everything, getting all the systems in place, and then hopefully have some strawberry champagne.
Because bitcoin is rising, but it may still be the ethereum show. Bitcoin is perhaps just making way for the eth excitement as the world’s second biggest network by fiat value, and number one in usage, gets ready for a transformative upgrade to Proof of Stake.
