The Ethereum price is up by 4 per cent in today’s trading session, extending a bullish trend of the past two trading sessions. The surge in price comes as the platform continues to prepare for the final phase of the Ethereum merge.
According to reports, the Bellatrix upgrade, which will see Ethereum migrating from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, will be carried out next week, sometime between September 13-16. This was confirmed by Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the Ethereum platform, on his Twitter account.
The proof-of-work consensus mechanism requires all computers maintaining a blockchain to agree when adding a new transaction. Therefore, it is a very tedious process that requires high computation power to complete a single transaction. The consensus mechanism also requires a lot of power to process transactions, which has seen it come under a lot of criticism in the past few years for not being environmentally friendly.
The proof of stake(POS), on the other hand, uses validators to process transactions. Therefore, this mechanism does not require as much computer processing power and electricity to process transactions. In fact, the merge will see the energy requirement on the Ethereum network reduced by over 98 per cent.
The upcoming merge will be a make-or-break for the Ethereum network. Therefore, going into next week, the one thing you should be looking for is the success of the merge. Should the process not go smoothly, we are likely to see that translated into the markets and Ethereum prices falling.
However, based on multiple reports, the merge is likely to be a success. Therefore, in the next few trading sessions, I am bullish on Ethereum. There is a high likelihood that we might see ETH climbing above the $2,000 price level again. Next week’s events will also have a long-term impact on the crypto and likely see it start another aggressive push to the upside.
This post was last modified on %s = human-readable time difference 13:36