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ETFs on Solana. When (and if) they are approved.

etf solana

The Solana ETFs have not yet been approved. Some expected them to arrive on 25 January, as the first SEC deadline loomed for the proposed approvals of the VanEck, 21Shares, Canary, and Bitwise ETFs.

What do the experts foresee concerning recent events related to the new US president? What impact could a future approval have on Solana’s price? Find out in this article.

Buy Solana

What is missing for ETFs on Solana?

According to some crypto analysts, the SEC could have approved the Solana ETFs on January 25, as the first deadlines for the proposals from VanEck, 21Shares, Canary, and Bitwise were approaching. However, similar to the situation with Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, the Solana ETFs were not approved by the initial deadline. As a result, we will have to wait at least until March 11, the date for the second deadline.

Optimists point out that the SEC’s chairman is no longer Gary Gensler, who has been a long-time critic of the industry. This reflects much of the prevailing sentiment within the US Democratic political landscape. Mark Uyeda, a pro-crypto Republican, has taken office. The political landscape includes Republicans and Donald Trump, who recently launched a meme coin related to Solana’s blockchain.

In summary, the future of Solana ETFs remains uncertain. According to Polymarket, the leading prediction market in the crypto world, there is a high probability (89%) that approval will occur by the end of 2025, although the timeline may still be unpredictable. With Donald Trump back in government, the volatility in the market seems to have increased, making it clear that anything could happen at any time.

A good time for Solana

Solana is performing well, regardless of whether its ETFs are approved in March or face further delays. A significant factor in this success is that the US president selected it as the infrastructure for launching his official meme coin.

Let’s focus on some concrete figures. The total value locked (TVL) on the network has reached a new all-time high of $12 billion, surpassing the previous record of $10 billion set in 2022. Trading volumes are also at their highest: according to DefiLlama, Solana’s blockchain processed over $200 billion in transactions in January alone.

Lastly, it’s important not to overlook the impressive revenues, which, as expected given the results mentioned, reached almost USD 100 million in January alone.

The recent price movements of Solana (SOL)

What has been described so far is also reflected in the price trend of Solana, one of the few altcoins that has risen in recent days. Following a low of $185 on January 13, the cryptocurrency experienced a strong rebound, recording four consecutive days of upward movement, ultimately reaching $220 on January 18.

Check out Solana’s graph!

However, something unexpected happened shortly after: Donald Trump launched his official meme coin. At that moment, many cryptocurrency enthusiasts began to realize that, at least at this stage of the market, Solana is outperforming all other Layer 1 protocols in the race towards mass adoption. From the $220 level reached on January 18, SOL surged to a new all-time high of $295 in less than 48 hours.

The subsequent physiological retracement settled around the $230 mark and appears to have already run its course. SOL is now heading back towards $270. So, where could it go in this bull market?

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Ethereum Rebounds Thanks to ETFs

After the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, Bloomberg expects Ethereum ETFs to follow. How has the market reacted?

These are festive days for crypto enthusiasts, marked by much positive news. Following the approval of Bitcoin ETFs yesterday evening, many now anticipate Ethereum ETFs. This may be why its price has surged in recent hours.

What will happen in the coming days? Will the anticipated spot ETFs on Ethereum in May arrive? Find out all the latest news on this topic in this article!

Ethereum ETFs: Are They Coming Soon?

According to Eric Balchunas, one of the world’s leading ETF experts, there’s a 70% chance that Ethereum ETFs will arrive. This may be why the SEC’s announcement initially positively impacted Ethereum’s price more than BTC. The most capitalised crypto in the market had already partly priced in the event, although in the last hours, it’s recording a +9% increase compared to yesterday.

In any case, the long-term outlook for the entire market is optimistic; the bear market is officially over, and large investment funds are ready to inject significant amounts of money to offer their “brand new” financial instruments.

The first helpful deadline for Ethereum ETFs, which could grant another victory to the crypto world, is May 23rd. We will see if the SEC and its chairman, Gary Gensler, will set aside their reservations about the crypto created by Vitalik Buterin.

The Impact on Charts of ETF Approval

Those expecting a tumultuous price movement immediately after the ETF approval might be disappointed; Bitcoin’s value in the hours following the announcement remained between $44,500 and $47,000. It’s probably because the whole world expected an affirmative response from the SEC. The situation changed after trading on the ETFs began, which recorded more than 2 billion in volumes in a few minutes. Bitcoin has reached nearly $49,000 and now seems intent on reaching the crucial level of $50,000.

However, Ethereum’s rally started earlier. Probably thanks to the words of Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas and other commentators on the Ethereum ETFs. The crypto broke through the $2,400 support and reached $2,600 overnight.

The current scenario in which Bitcoin’s price action is placed could further improve thanks to the entry of investment funds. According to estimates by Chartered Bank, BlackRock, VanEck, and Microstrategy, from 40 to 100 billion in the next four years.

The fact that Bitcoin’s price didn’t react super explosively to the announcement could also be an opportunity for retailers, especially those with a strategy to protect themselves from volatility. Our strategy is recurring purchases involving tiny, regular purchases over time; try it in the Moneybox section of our app!

One question remains: when did the trading of ETFs officially begin? These financial instruments are available on three exchanges: The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NASDAQ, and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE).

Trading on the most famous, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust listed on NASDAQ, began a few hours ago, while for the Galaxy Bitcoin ETF by Invesco, available on the CBOE, it was already possible to set purchase orders from last night. The volume counter generated by these financial instruments has gone crazy; at the time of writing, more than 2 billion dollars in spot ETFs on Bitcoin have already been traded.

These are all the latest essential news on ETFs on Ethereum and Bitcoin. Continue following our blog so you do not miss any updates.

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Ethereum Shanghai, the latest update explained

Ethereum Shanghai: everything you need to know about the upgrade

Ethereum: what will happen after the Shanghai update?

We are very close to the activation of Ethereum‘s new update, Shanghai. This will allow users to withdraw ETHs they had locked in staking from 2020. That year marked the beginning of Ethereum becoming a Proof-of-Stake, thanks to the emergence of Beacon Chains, a parallel network managed by the new consensus mechanism. It was the developers who chose to block withdrawals for this long period of time. The reason? To ensure maximum security of the blockchain that could have been in trouble due to mass withdrawals. 

After the Beacon Chain came The Merge update, which was activated on 15 September 2022. On that occasion, the merger of the parent blockchain to the Beacon Chain took place, the union into a single blockchain managed by a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Now all eyes in the crypto world are once again on Ethereum because of the Shanghai update. Everything you need to know is in this article! What impact could this have on the price of ETH?

Ethereum Shanghai: what is the update for? What happens next?

The purpose of the Shanghai update is very simple and clear: to enable withdrawals for those who have staked their ETH so far. 

After activation, those who participated in Ethereum’s consensus mechanism by staking can decide whether to leave their ETHs where they are. Or whether to redeem them with the ‘unstake‘ function. In this case, it is not possible to choose an amount of crypto to unstake, the entire amount originally staked will be returned. 

With the activation of the Shanghai update, all users, both those who decide to redeem their crypto and those who continue with staking, will receive the rewards they have accumulated through the validation of transactions on the blockchain. The rewards will be sent automatically to users’ wallets if they have provided their withdrawal address. 

For those who have staked through providers, and not directly on Ethereum, precise instructions on how the unstake will be handled have not yet been communicated.  

Shanghai Activation Date

The date on which Ethereum’s Shanghai update will be activated has not yet been announced. What is known, however, is the day on which the last testbed will take place: 14 March on the Goerli testnet; during the previous tests, which took place in February on Zhejiang and Sepolia, everything went smoothly. The mechanism regulating the activation of Shanghai is described in the ‘Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP -4895)’, in which all the functions that will be inserted or changed within the smart contract that regulates staking are set out. 

How will Shanghai affect the price of Ethereum?

The Shanghai update is a key turning point in Ethereum’s roadmap and therefore could have an impact on its price. Although it is impossible to predict with certainty what will happen, one can speculate. Here are the factors that could cause ETH’s price to fall and those that could lead to a pump.

Why could the price of Ethereum collapse?

The update could cause increased selling pressure and consequently a drop in price. Users could withdraw Ethereum en masse and sell it on the market together with the Ethereum distributed as a reward. If this were to occur, we could see a domino effect that would cause the price of ETH to collapse.

Will the price of Ethereum rally after Shanghai?

Looking at the on-chain data, there are those who argue that the price of Ethereum will rise. In particular, the value to watch is the amount of ETH currently blocked in the staking smart contract.

To date, there are about 17 million Ethereum staked, which corresponds to less than 20% of the circulating supply of about 120 million. This figure is much lower than on other Proof-of-Stake blockchains, where the percentage of staked cryptos is around 40% (on Solana and Cardano it is even higher than 70%).

At the moment, not many users have locked their ETH in staking, the main reason being that their crypto is tied up for long periods of time. After Shanghai the situation might change, we will be able to withdraw and deposit freely. In this case, we could see the number of staked ETH increase and consequently see a reduction in selling pressure on Ether and thus an increase in price. 

It is important to note that a large percentage of the ETHs staked were deposited by users more than a year ago, and the average purchase price of these cryptos is over $2,000. To date, users staking Ethereum who are in profit are only 16% while the remaining 84% are in loss. Therefore, to cause a decrease in the price of Ethereum, users would have to sell their Ether at a loss, a hypothesis that seems remote. Indeed, it is assumed that those who have chosen to staking their cryptos without knowing when they will be able to unlock them, strongly believe in Vitalik Buterin‘s project.

The future of dapps for staking

Those who will definitely be affected by the Shanghai update are the dapps that offer staking and yield farming services on Ethereum. These include liquid staking platforms that are used by those who only want to stake small amounts of Ether. The possible consequences for these types of services are mainly twofold.

With the possibility of depositing and withdrawing ETH at any time given by the Shanghai update, these dapps could develop new functionalities. New DeFi projects will probably also emerge to explore all opportunities to maximise rewards. 

Moreover, there are those who see Shanghai as the next standard of basic staking returns for the entire crypto world. These dapps will thus have to compete directly with Ethereum, as well as with their own competitors, and offer rewards more profitable than those guaranteed by the blockchain created by Vitalik Buterin.

In short, Shanghai will start a new cycle of innovation for the Ethereum network that could affect a huge number of projects and hundreds of thousands of users in the crypto world. 
But Ethereum’s renewal does not end with the Shanghai update. The developers are always working to improve the blockchain. On the horizon are Sharding and then The Surge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge updates!

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YNG Token: June – September 2022 Report

Token Young (YNG): updates and news Q4 2024

We report Young (YNG)’s first few months on the Market, with a focus on the Clubs’ performance and upcoming news!

Four months after the market launch of the Young (YNG) Token, we take stock of the distribution, sales and use cases of Young Platform’s token. In this report, which was compiled at the beginning of October 2022, you will find an overview of the first months, the updated distribution of Young (YNG) and the future goals of the project.

What is the YNG token

The YNG token is a utility token based on Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard. Utility tokens are cryptocurrencies designed to facilitate access to an ecosystem and its services. In fact, the YNG token is at the heart of the whole Young Platform project. You can receive some as a reward on Step, or use it to gain access to Clubs and take advantage of exclusive benefits. Developing a utility token like YNG was an opportunity to make the Young Platform community and users even more active and involved. You can find out about its tokenomics in detail, from full availability to use cases.

All the numbers of Young Platform Clubs

As we have just explained, one of the new features of the Young Platform ecosystem are the Clubs. They have been active since June 2022. By joining one of the four available Clubs, you get access to discounts, rewards and benefits. Over time, more and more benefits will be made available as the Clubs grow, step by step with the community. In winter 2022, the activation of the airdrop function is planned.

The clubs currently have 1019 members, divided into:

●     780 for the Bronze club;

●     121 for the Silver club;

●     81 for the Gold club;

●     37 for the Platinum Club.

Since Club membership requires a minimum of 1500 YNG, participation is a good benchmark to measure the success of the initiative and the satisfaction of loyal supporters. Another interesting statistic in this report is the Club drop-out rate. From an initial number of 720 active users, the user base now stands at 1019, indicating a growth of +41.5%. This number greatly influences the value of the YNG token, since the more tokens get locked into the Clubs by members, the lower sales get and thus downward price pressure lessens. This means that the larger the community gets, the more incentive it has to grow.

Distribution of the YNG token

As of the 30th May 2022, the total supply of YNG was 100M tokens, while the circulating supply was 16.73M. Today (October 2022), the circulating supply stands at about 18 million, which means that there has been a net increase of 1.7M tokens, or 7.6%.

These tokens were distributed via the Young Platform Step app in different ways:

●     56,399.04 through the completion of Quizzes by 97,446 users;

●     1,007,551.63 by obtaining rewards from 222,063 users;

●     638,684.83 through the use of the ‘Up&Down’ function by 223,035 users.

As anticipated in June, the YNG token market is run through an algorithm that defines the exchange rate by means of two underlying liquidity pools in EUR and YNG respectively. Initially, these pools contained:

–       1M Euro;

–       4M YNG.

Considering the sales and purchases of tokens handled in recent months, at the beginning of October 2022 the pools contained

–       789.7k Euro;

–       5.3M YNG.

With regard to activities on the YNG-EUR market, we feel it is important to provide those reading this report with a summary of what has been YNG’s market performance from June to date:

Token Young YNG Report June September 2022

This data suggests that although the average price of tokens has fallen, they are still in high demand, given the high sales volumes. In the near future, we will implement buyback operations to better adjust the value of the tokens.

Future Objectives

Finally, for the sake of transparency, we present you some of our future goals.

●     The first one we can announce is something we already planned months ago, the implementation of airdrop events for our club members. The release of the first airdrop is planned for the last quarter of 2022.

●     The second goal requires a long process that we have already started. It consists of including Young Platform and the YNG token on two of the largest aggregators in the world: CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. Completion is expected by the end of 2022.

●     The third goal we are planning is just as important: it consists of issuing debit cards to our users. The deadline for this project, at least in its initial phase, was planned for the last quarter of 2022. However, before presenting this project to our Club members, we want to wait for the completion of the infrastructure offered to us by the designated issuing partner. Therefore, we plan for the beta release for Club users to be available for the end of the first quarter of 2023. Due to this necessity, we have preferred to postpone the listing on third-party token exchanges as we believe that the low organic volume of YNG will not support the activities in question, but may harm the market for the token.

●     The fourth objective we want to talk about is something that is, to say the least, fundamental to be able to support the activities already mentioned in terms of liquidity and the value of the tokens. In Q4 2022 we will announce the first series of buyback operations, aimed at discouraging excessive token presence in the market. The buyback is the re-purchase of YNG tokens by Young Platform to reduce the circulating supply. These operations will be accompanied by promotional campaigns to organically increase the volume of tokens.

●     The remaining objectives are mainly dedicated to our community, and to improving the services and experiences for club members. Here are some of the activities we plan to implement:

– Monthly market reports, to present the up to date situation to our members

– Exclusive collaborations with influencers, with content reserved for Clubs;

– Discord Section dedicated to Clubs, for frequent Q&A sessions for members;

– Merchandising that will be sent according to the Club a member belongs to;

– In addition to the fee discount, a defined number of free deposits will be granted to club members.

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The 3 main Ethereum hard forks: ETC, ETHW and ETHF

Ethereum 2.0: the 3 main forks after The Merge: ETHW, ETC, ETF

Ethereum Classic, Ethereum Proof-of-Work and Ethereum Fair. Everything you didn’t know about the 3 main Ethereum hard forks after The Merge!

On the 25th of September 2022, The Merge update that changed the consensus mechanism of the Ethereum blockchain was successfully activated. The Ethereum network went from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake without a hitch. For users,The Merge did not bring significant changes, but the same wasn’t true for miners. In the previous version of the blockchain, miners were in charge of validating transactions and consequently blocks on the blockchain, thus earning ETH rewards for each validated block. Therefore, many of them had to move to other blockchains out of necessity ; some of them already existed, others were specially created as hard forks of the main Ethereum blockchain. A hard fork, in cryptocurrency jargon, is when a project is updated in such a way that it is incompatible with the previous version, giving rise to something new. Let’s learn about the 3 main hard forks after The Merge: ETHW, ETC and ETHF.

The most classic of hard forks, Ethereum Classic

Ethereum Classic is perhaps the most famous hard fork in crypto history. ETC was born as a result of a hack on Ethereum’s DAO in July 2016. The hack targeted was an early form of a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation), a type of organisation that is very popular nowadays in the Web3 world. It allows users who own the crypto of an ecosystem to actively participate in the initiatives and politics of a project.

Ethereum’s The DAO was supposed to be a kind of Venture Capital, with the aim of financing projects within Web3, based on users’ Ether votes from the community. In the days immediately following its launch, the DAO managed to raise $150 million in ETH from more than 11,000 different users. However, in July 2016, one or more hackers breached The DAO’s smart contract. They managed to steal 3.6 million Ethereum, about 14% of the total supply at that time. Following this breach of the Ethereum blockchain, the community was called upon to take a vote on the future of the network. The solution that most people agreed on was the creation of a hard fork.

The main Ethereum blockchain became the Ethereum Classic blockchain, while the new fork that came about as a result of the hard fork became the Ethereum network we all know. But what does Ethereum Classic have to do with The Merge update? ETC is the best-known hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain and has been active since 2016. Although it has been the victim of a few attacks in the past, it continues to resist and process transactions without any particular problems. Precisely for this reason, a large number of miners, left ‘unemployed’ after The Merge, decided to use their computational power to validate ETC transactions instead.

The hashrate of the Ethereum Classic blockchain went from about 50 trillion hash functions per second (Th/s) to about 150 trillion today. It peaked on the day of The Merge, with a hash rate of 300 Th/s. The term indicates the total performance of the network, specifically the amount of hashing functions executed in one second. The increase in hashing functions that occurred simultaneously with the activation of The Merge update shows the amount of miners that migrated from Ethereum to Ethereum Classic.

The resilience of miners, Ethereum Proof-of-Work is born

ETHW was the main Ethereum hard fork after The Merge. Some Ethereum miners decided to copy Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work blockchain and thus create ETHW. The ETHW crypto was distributed to all those who owned Ethereum on both decentralised wallets and exchanges via a snapshot. The latter makes it possible to see the amount of crypto and the addresses that owned that amount at a given time.

Despite the great popularity of this crypto in the days immediately preceding The Merge, the launch was not the best. ETHW’s network suffered various problems allegedly caused by a hack that now seems to have been resolved. In the hours immediately following the launch, ETHW was subject to very high volatility. In fact, it peaked at $50 and then fell back to around $10 in the following hours.

The future direction of ETHW is still uncertain. The project’s white paper, a document in which the main information of a blockchain protocol and goals for the future are usually found, as of today consists of ten pages. The first five pages are devoted exclusively to the title of the whitepaper ‘The Original Ethereum Blockchain powered by Proof of Work’ in English and Chinese, the remaining five have the words ‘these pages have been left intentionally blank’. So the whitepaper is not very constructive. We will see whether ETHW plans to design something for the future or whether it will remain only the ‘second home’ of the now former Ethereum miners.

Ethereum’s third hard fork after The Merge: Ethereum Fair

The third Ethereum hard fork after The Merge is Ethereum Fair, which was created on the 15th of September 2022. The ETHF crypto, at first named ETF, was however not distributed to Ether holders, but to those who owned Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Ethereum Classic. ETHF, however, does not seem to have won over the miners, and the market in general. The crypto was launched at a starting price of about $15 and in a fortnight has lost more than 70 per cent of its value.

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7 changes happening to Ethereum following The Merge

Ethereum 2.0: new features after The Merge explained in 7 points

The Ethereum 2.0 update has been successfully activated! Find out what’s new after The Merge in 7 points

The Merge was a major achievement in the field of computing. The update went live on Thursday, the 15th of September 2022 without any hiccups. The Ethereum blockchain started validating transactions through the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm smoothly starting from block number 15537393. As is usually the case with big events, the general euphoria passes and many questions begin to circulate about the aftermath. Will Ethereum become more centralised? What happened to the price of Ethereum? If you want to know more, read the news after The Merge explained in 7 points!

1.   Why did the price of Ethereum plummet after The Merge?

On the day of the activation of The Merge, ETH lost about 10 percentage points by drawing a red candle on the chart. But why did Ethereum collapse after the success of The Merge? Two main reasons can be identified, one is closely linked to The Merge and the other is inherent to the macro-economic situation we find ourselves in at the moment. In the current economic context, we are witnessing a raise of interest rates by the FED (the US central bank), and an increase of supply in the markets. This is certainly to the detriment of assets considered risky, such as cryptocurrencies. The price of Ether therefore fell by more than 20% after The Merge.

The second reason is precisely due to the activation of The Merge. Miners, who in the previous version of Ethereum Proof-of-Work were in charge of validating transactions, reportedly sold around 20,000 ETH in the hours following The Merge (according to OKlink‘s data). This helped to drive Ethereum’s price down.

2.   Is Ethereum more centralised after The Merge?

Someone pointed out that after The Merge, Ethereum would be more centralised than before. This is because there are currently fewer nodes involved in validating transactions on the Proof-of-Stake blockchain than on the Proof-of-Work network.

In a blockchain that works via the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm, transactions are validated by staking. The validator nodes of the Ethereum network, i.e. those with at least 32 ETH, are responsible for approving all transactions and are rewarded by the network through Ether rewards. Most of these nodes are organisations called staking pools that pool users’ Ether who want to delegate their crypto to participate in the consensus mechanism.

Criticism regarding centralisation has been raised because these staking pools are few in number and hold large amounts of Ether on behalf of users. One of the risks of this situation could be the centralisation of decisions and processes in the Ethereum network. However, this criticism contrasts with the idea that providers would earn money in relation to the amount of Ether they possess and consequently the number of users who choose to use them. According to this hypothesis, they would have no incentive to censor transactions and thus risk losing users and revenue. What will be the next developments? Will other staking pools arise that will help to further decentralise the Ethereum network?

The second point that Ether’s detractors try to leverage is the geographical location of the validator nodes. In response to this, a report available on the official website of Lido, one of the most widely used staking pools, shows that Lido’s validator nodes are geographically distributed. No country has more than 15% of the total in terms of the presence of validators on its territory. Not only that: Lido itself is an organisation whose goal is to improve its decentralisation and whose staking protocols are already regulated by a DAO.

3.   Beware of fake news post The Merge

On Thursday,  the 15th of September 2022, some major Italian newspapers reported the news that the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, had hacked the Twitter profile of the Ministry for Ecological Transition, led by minister Roberto Cingolani. Obviously, none of this happened; Vitalik Buterin’s name that appeared as a profile handle was inserted by a fraudster. The Italian Web3 community was obviously very critical of the famous newspapers that raised the alarm. A series of very funny memes were born, which emphasised the misinformation and the tendency to instrumentalise information without verifying it.

4.   How do Ethereum’s tokenomics change after The Merge?

One of the 7 innovations after The Merge concerns Ethereum’s tokenomics. Tokenomics is the model that describes the economic characteristics of a token and contains all information related to the issuance and distribution of a blockchain token. The switch from the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm to the Proof-of-Stake algorithm will result in lower ETH issuance, which will also affect the crypto’s inflation. In the period before The Merge, inflation was around 4%. Immediately following The Merge, Ether had a deflationary trend, in other words, more Ether were destroyed than issued.

Ethereum’s tokenomics will also undergo changes after the next scheduled update for Ethereum, called Shanghai. In the months following The Merge, until the activation of Shanghai, it will not be possible for stakers to withdraw their ETH. The update will regulate ETH withdrawals from staking, affecting the amount of cryptocurrency circulating.

5.   Has The Merge turned Ethereum into a zero-impact blockchain?

The Ethereum team hopes so. According to the Ethereum Foundation, thanks to the consensus algorithm change, the network will reduce energy consumption by 99.5 per cent. In Proof-of-Stake blockchains, transactions are validated through staking and not thanks to the computational power provided by the miners. It has been estimated that due to The Merge, worldwide energy consumption will be reduced by 0.2%. The Merge update could therefore change the entire industry’s narrative regarding potential climate damage.

6.   Next steps after The Merge for a more scalable network?

Now that The Merge has been activated, what is the next step for Ethereum? Vitalik Buterin spoke about this at a conference on the 21st of July 2021. The main goal is the scalability of the network, as it has been since 2017 when the use of the network increased exponentially. Today, Ethereum’s network is able to process around 20 transactions per second. In the future, with the use of some scalability solutions, it will be possible to reach even 100,000 transactions per second. The next upgrade to The Merge will be The Surge. Two phases will coexist within The Surge, the first is called proto-Danksharding and should take place within a year. With this update, which will serve to increase the amount of data that can be stored on each block, it will be possible to make transactions on Ethereum Layer 2s even cheaper. The second phase of The Surge will be called Danksharding and will aim to scale the Ethereum network also on Layer 2s through the use of so-called rollups. Rollups deal with aggregating multiple ‘off-chain’ transactions that are then ‘presented’ to the Ethereum blockchain as unique transactions.

7.   Where will Ethereum miners go?

The last point of news after The Merge concerns the fate of ETH miners. They had to equip themselves to find new blockchains where they could move all their computational power. By analysing the hash power, and thus the computational power of some alternative blockchains to Ethereum, it became clear where the miners left without employment were headed. For instance, Ethereum Classic‘s hash power skyrocketed by 500% and Ravencoin’s by 800%. Are these the cryptos favoured by miners? Those who have not moved to these alternative coins are probably thinking about other options, such as offering their computing power to cloud computing or data processing players like Amazon Web Service or validating the Proof-of-Stake version of the network by creating nodes. Other former Ethereum miners decided to create hard forks to continue their activities. There have been two hard forks since The Merge: ETHW (Ethereum Proof-of-Work) and ETF (Ethereum Fair). The two hard forks have not been recognised by Ethereum and are therefore unrelated projects to the blockchain created by Vitalik Buterin. An interesting fact about the Ethereum Fair hard fork is that it was distributed to those who owned Dogecoin, Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin but not to those who owned ETHs. Both hard forks were subject to great volatility in the hours immediately following The Merge.

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The Merge is live! The first hours of Ethereum 2.0 and the crypto community’s reactions

The Merge is live! Ethereum 2.0's first moments and reactions

The Merge was activated on the 15th of September 2022. What happened during the first hours of Ethereum 2.0? How did the crypto sector react?

The activation of The Merge update has been called a ‘milestone’, a ‘historic moment‘ and a ‘revolution’. In recent months, The Merge has been narrated in a few different ways. It has been interpreted as the engine change of a running car, or as a spaceship not yet ready for interstellar travel according to the Ethereum Foundation’s comparison. Any narrative has tried to do justice to the scale of this update, one of the largest open-source software projects in history, which required the coordination of dozens of teams, researchers, developers and volunteers.

Some people on the night of 14th – 15th of September followed the crucial moments of The Merge minute by minute as if they were watching the launch of a space mission. As the TTD approached, watch parties and streams began to follow the precise moment the Merge was completed. Everyone gathered together from all over the world. Those who watched the Ethereum Foundation’s live broadcast also received a celebratory POAP, an NFT that will forever prove attendance at the pivotal event of the blockchain conceived by Vitalik Buterin. Check out the first hours of Ethereum 2.0 and the crypto community’s reactions to the activation of The Merge!

Ethereum is now Proof-of-Stake!

With Proof-of-Stake, Ethereum is now ready for interstellar travel. On Thursday the 15th of September at 06:42:42 UTC, the Total Terminal Difficulty 58750000000000000 was reached and the Beacon Chain was finally integrated with Ethereum’s mainnet. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, commented on the activation of The Merge with this statement: “And we have finalised! Happy merge everyone, this is a great moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel really proud today.”

The first epoch, i.e. the first packet of 32 blocks, of Ethereum 2.0 was finalised at 06:59. This was the litmus test that kept everyone in suspense. The finalisation of the first epoch confirmed that Ethereum 2.0 was working properly. The last block of Ethereum Proof-of-Work, number 15537393, was mined by the F2Pool mining pool, one of the first pools to deal with Bitcoin mining. The gas paid by the pool for the transaction was 29,991,429 gwei, which is the smallest unit of Ether (1 ETH consists of one billion gwei). The miner of the last PoW block included a message in Mandarin in the block itself: “七彩神仙鱼F!”, which translates to “Colourful Angelfish F!”. From then on, the miners were no longer responsible for the validation of Ethereum transactions. An NFT was created from ethereum’s last mined block and created for sale on OpenSea under the name ‘The Last POW Block’.

Celebrations for The Merge and the first NFT on Ethereum PoS

A few hours after the activation of The Merge, someone paid 36 ETH (the equivalent of $57,600) to ‘mine’ the first NFT on Ethereum 2.0. The non-fungible token represents a panda and some details of the state of the blockchain at the time it was created.

Why a panda? The animal became the symbol of The Merge because it was pictured as a combination of a white bear and a black bear. A few days ago, Sam Padilla, Google’s Web3 engineer, introduced a small easter egg in the search engine screens. When a user would search for ‘The Merge Ethereum’ or similar terms, the countdown for the update appeared alongside two little bears, one white and one black. As the countdown elapsed, they moved ever closer to each other. The timer was directly connected to the blockchain and updated in real time. From now on after the successful completion of the merge, a panda appears clutching the ETH symbol between its paws.

Beeple, the famous NFT artist, also paid homage to The Merge by posting his latest work depicting a giant Ethereum symbol on Twitter.

The crypto community’s reactions to The Merge

The crypto community exploded in comments and celebrations after the activation of The Merge. Here are some of them!

1. Yuga Labs

Yuga Labs, the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club, the leading NFT collection built on Ethereum, wrote: “Congratulations to the entire Ethereum team on a successful merge. This is a historic moment for us and a big step in scaling Ethereum to its first billion users.” For Yuga Labs, it is crucial that Ethereum becomes a blockchain capable of handling a large volume of transactions simultaneously. Especially now that it is building Otherside, its Metaverse.

2. Tim Beiko, the spokesman for the developers of The Merge

‘We are done. It’s done. We merged. Holy s**t. Amazing work everyone!” was how Tim Beiko, one of the developers most involved in The Merge, commented on the success of the update.

3.    Justin Sun, Charles Hoskinson, Emin Gun Sirer

Congratulations on the successful upgrade of Ethereum also came from competitors. Among them, congratulations came from the founders of Tron, Avalanche and Cardano.

         Charles Hoskinson, who was part of the core founders of Ethereum, recorded a video in which he explained that he wanted to take a moment to praise the hard work of the people who brought about this ‘historic moment’. According to Hoskinson, The Merge is the most complex thing ever achieved in the crypto sector. An example of scientific progress and a victory for all!

On the same wavelength, Emin Gün Sirer of Avalanche wrote that the Merge was: ‘a moment and a milestone to remember. Congratulations to the developers who navigated enormous technical complexity. You should be incredibly proud’.

What happened to the price of ETH after The Merge

In the minutes immediately following the activation of the update, the value of the cryptocurrency dropped slightly (by 0.4 per cent compared to the previous 24 hours). However, the price of ETH after The Merge remained essentially unchanged, hovering around $1,600.

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5 interesting facts about The Merge, the update that will change crypto forever

The Merge: 5 things you didn't know about the Ethereum update

The update that will change Ethereum and crypto forever is coming. Find out 5 things you didn’t know about The Merge!

‘The Merge’ refers to the set of updates that will lead the Ethereum blockchain to change its consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. In the crypto world, this has been the talk of the town for months. The Ethereum update is so important that ‘The Merge’ has become a commonly used term to indicate the final activation of the update and more generally the passage to the 2.0 version of Ethereum.

So, what will change with Ethereum 2.0? Transactions will be faster, cheaper and more green. The network will be more decentralised and secure, which will make the Ethereum blockchain more scalable and energy efficient. However, The Merge will not only impact Vitalik Buterin‘s blockchain, the upgrade will also change the crypto world forever. Ethereum is the blockchain on which the main Decentralised Finance protocols are built and in which the world of NFTs is developed. To learn more about the more technical aspects of The Merge, we refer you to Academy’s article on Ethereum 2.0. However, read on to discover 5 things you didn’t know about The Merge!

1.   Why is the Ethereum update called The Merge?

This Ethereum update is called ‘The Merge’ because it consists of the merging of two chains into one. With the update, Ethereum’s Beacon Chain and mainnet will be merged together. The former is the Proof-of-Stake network that has been active since 2020 and used as a ‘Consensus’ layer, but not yet for processing transactions. The mainnet, on the other hand, is the only ‘Execution’ layer of the blockchain on which miners will work until The Merge. With the completion of the upgrade, these two chains will be merged together to improve the performance of Ethereum.

2.   Why is the release date of The Merge changing?

The final phase and activation of the update was planned for September 2022. For a long time no official date for the release of The Merge was communicated. In the past months, the date has been postponed more than once. Even when September was identified as a possible date, the Ethereum developers only hinted at a broad activation period, namely between the 10th and the 20th of September. On the 6th September, Vitalik Buterin narrowed it down to between the 13th and 15th of the month. But why is the exact release date of The Merge not known? Ethereum’s developers did not schedule the update based on the calendar, and thus on a time parameter, but by referring to the Total Terminal Difficulty (TTD). The TTD is the value reached at which the Proof-of-Stake update will be released. It can be understood as similar to the score obtained in order to pass a level in a video game. The Merge will only be completed when the TTD of the value 58750000000000000 is reached. The TTD is the parameter that indicates the level of difficulty that miners have to face to validate the last block in Ethereum’s Proof-of-Work. This value depends on many factors and it is therefore not possible to establish with certainty when the network will reach that value. This is why the date of The Merge is constantly changing.

3.   Beyond Buterin, here is the team of The Merge

Among the thousands of programmers who keep the Ethereum protocol going, you may not know that 119 experts are working on The Merge. Together with this group, some prominent personalities from the crypto world have also joined. From the Ethereum Foundation, researchers Danny Ryan and Justin Drake have contributed directly to The Merge project. The former has been working on The Merge since 2017 (fun fact: The Merge and the move to PoS had already been suggested in 2015, shortly after the birth of Ethereum), in relation to issues such as scalability, sustainability and security. Drake, on the other hand, had a coordination and public relations role.

Vitalik Buterin, of course, also contributed to The Merge update as the mastermind behind the new understanding of Ethereum and as a populariser with the general public. We can credit Buterin for the design philosophy of the new consensus mechanism. Another key figure is Tim Beiko who heads the team of developers. Beiko became the main spokesperson on social media for the development team and managed the many steps necessary for The Merge. Among all the people working on The Merge, we should also mention Mikhail Kalinin of ConsenSys, a software development company that collaborates with Ethereum. They established the details of the Beacon Chain and, according to Beiko, Kalinin is one of those who ‘literally built and steered the ship’. Kalinin called his experience at Ethereum ‘an example of true diversification and decentralisation of work on a research and development project’.

4.   Will there be a new Ethereum 2.0 coin?

As the completion of The Merge approaches, many have wondered whether Ethereum 2.0, the new version of the Proof-of-Stake blockchain, will have a new coin. And again, what will happen to the existing ETHs in our wallets? To answer this question, you have to consider the two possible scenarios following the activation of the update. After The Merge there could be a hard fork of the blockchain in which Ethereum would split into two different chains, one with the consensus mechanism it has always had (PoW) and another that relies instead on staking to validate transactions. In this case, a new coin would be created accordingly, which is currently referred to as ‘ETHPOW’. The chain with the PoS consensus mechanism will retain Ether (ETH) as its native coin, and the PoW chain will instead continue mining ETHPOW. The PoW chain will only remain in existence as long as miners continue to use and support it.

Should a new cryptocurrency actually be created, it will be distributed via airdrop in a 1:1 ratio. Basically your ETH holdings will not change because of this. To prepare for The Merge on Young Platform, read the dedicated announcement.

5.   Sustainable NFTs in the spotlight

Among the 5 things you might not know about The Merge is the green revolution in the NFT world. Let’s consider that most non-fungible tokens are built on Ethereum. Following The Merge, there will be a drastic reduction in the environmental impact of NFT production and transactions. This is because the consensus mechanism that enables Ethereum activity will no longer rely on the computing power of the miners but on the mechanism of staking. In other words, all the electricity used to power the mining hardware will no longer be needed. All blockchain-related activities will be more energy sustainable. 

One of the main criticisms levelled at NFTs concerns the energy required for their ‘minting’, i.e. the process by which digital assets are created. Concerns about the pollution produced by non-fungible tokens have intensified, especially in the current context of an environmental and energy crisis. With greener NFTs, the sector could attract new enthusiasts and experience a creative rally. Creators and new projects will be able to indulge in creating art on the blockchain, no longer intimidated by the environmental footprint.

 

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Happy birthday to Tezos: 10 updates in 4 years!

Tezos celebrates its 4th birthday with a new update. Discover Jakarta and its scalability solutions!

On the 30th of June 2022, Tezos turned 4 years old! This date in fact coincides with the launch of the Genesis Block of the Breitman blockchain in 2018. In 4 years, Tezos has implemented no less than 10 updates in its network. The latest one is called Jakarta and went live on the 28th of June, following Ithaca in April 2022. Check out Jakarta and its scaling solutions to expand Tezos’ NFT ecosystem!

With the new Tezos update comes optimistic roll-ups

One of the reasons to be a fan of Tezos is that it is a blockchain that is constantly being updated. Tezos’ policy is to offer updates on a regular basis to provide the most functional and innovative technologies. The new Jakarta update continues Ithaca’s focus on optimising transaction finalisation. Jakarta was proposed on 16 April and went live on 28 June. The most notable feature of the new Tezos update is the inclusion of Transaction Optimistic Rollups (TORU) that will improve performance in terms of TPS (transactions per second). These rollups will be piloted for one year, and their final stay will depend on usage and feedback from the community.

How do optimistic roll-ups work?

Roll-ups are a Layer 2 scalability solution that allows a series of transactions to be merged off-chain into a single block that is recorded on Layer 1. Optimistic roll-ups are specific roll-ups in which transactions collected together are not verified once they are transferred to the main chain because they are assumed to be valid: “they are called optimistic because they work on the assumption that the validation is correct until explicitly proven otherwise.” The validity of transactions is verified as needed and security is guaranteed by a ‘Fraud Proof’ mechanism. Optimistic Rollups are used by Arbitrium and Optimism, two of Ethereum’s scalability solutions. 

Tezos’ scalability strategy? Everything for NFT!

Tezos‘s latest updates, such as Jakarta, are part of this blockchain’s scalability plan. With the new consensus mechanism (Tenderbake) Tezos has already improved the speed at which transactions are included and transcribed in the chain. But what is all this scalability for? To accommodate the adoption of projects and realities in the Tezos network, especially for those with a non-fungible and collectible token theme. For Tezos, NFTs have always been a focus, the scalability of the blockchain supports the ever-increasing number of transactions that are required to mine and sell NFTs. Scalability promotes mass adoption of Tezos as a network for NFTs!

Although they are not among the market leaders, the NFT marketplaces on Tezos have achieved significant results. Objkt for instance achieved a volume of over 100 million dollars. Not bad for a ‘secondary’ marketplace. Objkt is characterised by its green vocation, in fact it characterises its products with the hashtag #cleanNFT.