Merge Hype Gets $2,000 Back for Ethereum!

Early Saturday morning, the price of Ethereum went over $2,000 as excitement builds for its important Proof-of-Stake update.

This week, the people who work on Ethereum set a possible launch date for "the Merge" for the middle of September.

On the Merge Rally, ETH goes over $2,000

The trade in Merge is still going well.

ETH kept going up for a few more weeks and broke $2,000 for the first time since May.

At press time, CoinGecko data shows that the second-largest cryptocurrency is trading just above a key psychological milestone. Its market value has gone up by about 16% in the past week.

After the latest rise, ETH is up more than 100% from its low point in June, when the whole crypto market fell because Three Arrows Capital failed.

Even though the market's rise has helped a lot of cryptocurrencies, ETH has done better than most thanks to growing interest in its landmark "Merge" event.

In the coming weeks, Ethereum is expected to finish its long-delayed upgrade to Proof-of-Stake. This has been called one of the most important crypto events in history.

"The Merge" is a name for the process by which Ethereum's Proof-of-Work execution layer and Proof-of-Stake consensus layer will "merge."

Then, instead of miners, the network will use validators who stake ETH to check transactions.

The Ethereum community has given "The Merge" a lot of support because of the changes it will bring, like a 90% drop in the amount of ETH issued (because the network won't have to pay miners anymore) and a 99.9% drop in the amount of energy used.

In the past few weeks, the so-called "Merge trade" has become a popular way for traders to profit from the excitement about the update.

Along with ETH, many other tokens that are connected to Ethereum, like Lido and RocketPool, have also gone up.

Since it uses Proof-of-Work, Ethereum Classic has also done well, and it could become a hub for miners once they leave Ethereum itself.

Some supporters of Proof-of-Work are even planning to split Ethereum to keep a new ecosystem for miners. This idea has been backed by people like Justin Sun.

This week, Ethereum's last test run for the update on the Goerli testnet was the last step in the Merge rally.

The developers of the Ethereum Foundation then tentatively agreed that the upgrade will happen when the network reaches a Total Terminal Difficulty of 58750000000000000000000, after which Proof-of-Stake will be used to mine blocks.

At the moment, that should arrive between September 15 and 16.