Ether price unchanged after merger as miners look for hashrate home

Ether price unchanged after merger as miners look for hashrate home

The merger took place this morning - a milestone that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been anticipating for eight years - but the price of Ether has remained subdued.

In fact, Ether fell by up to 2% at the time of the transition. It has since recovered slightly and was trading at $1,590, down 1% in the last 24 hours as of 7:30 a.m. ET.

Bitcoin, which along with Dogecoin is now one of only two top 10 blockchains running on proof-of-work, saw its native cryptocurrency lose a similar amount, hovering around $20,150.

In fact, no top digital asset has been green in the past day. However, Cosmos, a rival Layer 1 blockchain, saw its native asset ATOM catch a 10% wave in the minutes immediately following the merger, jumping from $13.30 to as high as $14.64 this morning.

ATOM is currently the second best performing top 50 digital asset over the past week, up 12%, just behind Yuga Labs' ApeCoin, which gained 16%.

Such anti-climatic price action could leave some investors scratching their heads. Nevertheless, industry players remain optimistic about the long-term impact of the merger.

“The merger is far from priced in. Recent price movements have been largely influenced by

external macro factors coupled with broader industry shakeouts,” Daniel Dizon, CEO of Ethereum staking protocol Swell Network CEO, told Blockworks in an email.

Dizon expects the macro environment to normalize over time as the Ethereum ecosystem continues to innovate and evolve. This, combined with structural changes to Ether issuance, would be enough to bring in more retail and institutional capital, resulting in upward pressure on prices, Dizon said.

He added that the move to proof-of-stake “entrenched Ethereum as the de facto blockchain to power Web3 and beyond.” Future upgrades, particularly in terms of scalability, coupled with burgeoning activity in the Layer 2 landscape, are expected to make it difficult for alternative Layer 1 platforms to legitimately break into Ethereum's market share in the medium to long term.

Without Ether mining, other blockchains see an increase in hashrate

The Ethereum blockchain is no longer mineable. Its original fork, Ethereum Classic (ETC), has seen it Hashrate are exploding out of the merger, rising nearly 160% from 55 TH/s to 142 TH/s over the past day.

This makes the network more secure and less vulnerable to a 51% attack, something crucial like ETC suffered from several in the past.

Ethereum Classic's hashrate (which measures total computing power on the network) repeatedly reached all-time highs before the merger, having doubled between late July and early September.

For scale, Ethereum complete its last full day of proof-of-work mining at over 1,000 TH/s, while Dogecoin is currently at 542 TH/s - both of which dwarf ETC.

Crypto miners running high-performance GPUs are clearly trying to stay profitable using alternative networks. But that hasn't yet translated into any meaningful price movement for Ethereum Classic's native token, ETC, which is up 5% in the past day but only 2% in the past week - again, just noise.

One explanation could be that hashrate alone is of no use. Ethereum Classic currently has few transactions in his memory waiting to be mined – a total of 9 at press time, compared to 165,000 on Ethereum.

While Dogecoin and Litecoin have not seen large instant hashrate boosts, other proof-of-work chains have seen their own grow around the merger. RavenCoins is up 80% today (10 TH/s to 18 TH/s), while Syscoin’s, a much smaller blockchain jumped 50% in the last week (39 EH/s to 58 EH/s).

RavenCoin's eponymous native asset is up 75% in the last seven days, suggesting that markets are expecting miners to flock to the chain - at least in the short term.

And so these miners will no doubt be keeping an eye on Ethereum's latest fork, ETHPoW (ETHW), which is expected to officially go live sometime in the next 24 hours.

Ether fork price expected to be volatile after airdrop

Major mining pools have committed to supporting ETHW, along with prominent community figures such as early ETC supporter Chandler Guo.

Meanwhile, crypto exchanges have started releasing ETHW to users who owned Ether at the time of the merger.

An FTX market for the token is already active - after a brief dump of up to 15% from $20 to $17, ETHW has since climbed 75% to reach a local high of $30 before falling back below $24 at press time. However, that is less than 2% of the price of Ether.

At this point, ETHW's future seems suspect, barring deep-pocketed mining companies rushing in for what could be a last hurray. It seems unreasonable to expect that the chain could compete with Ethereum and its merry band of Layer 1 rivals, especially considering that no major stablecoin or DeFi protocol has pledged to operate on the network.

“Alternative Layer 1s – like Solana and Polkadot – still have a fair chance to innovate in consensus mechanisms, validator design, smart contract environment, peer-to-peer layers and more,” said Chen Zhuling, CEO of blockchain infrastructure provider RockX. said. “Many of these Layer 1 companies are also increasingly cultivating their developer communities and advocates.”

“The game is still on”

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The post Ether Price Flat After Merge as Miners Hunt for Hashrate Home is not financial advice.