Ethereum developers have launched the third and final merge on the testnet Goerly. Around 21:50 on Thursday, the developers simulated a Goerli merger and switched out of PoW consensus mode (proof of of work) to PoS consensus (proof of role). To do this, they had to “merge” Goerli’s code with his PoS-based fork called Prater. With Goerli’s trial merger completed, the team has now completed all dress rehearsals for the upcoming merger. According to the official timeline set by the Ethereum development team, the next step will be to perform a full merge on the mainnet.
After this latest successful test, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin announced that the transition will finally happen on September 15, 2022.
While the exact date may still be subject to change, the successes of various testnet mergers could be a promising sign that the Ethereum mainnet will make a smooth transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus next month. Before the merger can be completed, the calc Bellatrix needs to be done, which will implement the software needed by users to work on the consensus layer. This operation is scheduled for September 6, about 10 days before the merger. Certainly, barring a last-minute change, with the terminal difficulty set at 5875 trillion, Ethereum’s POW network now has a fixed number of hashes to process.
Shall we attend a bifurcation undisputed? Some actors intend to go in the opposite direction. Rumor has it that some Ether miners, many of whom depend on the income generated from PoW block rewards, will continue to use the original PoW version of Ethereum to maintain their earning potential. Crypto miner and investor Chandler Guo is a particular leader for miners bifurcation Ethereum network to create the Ethereum PoW (ETHW) chain. Guo seems to think there is enough room in the industry for there to be two types of Ethereum and has retweeted a number of reviews that support this idea. He promised to release the code needed to perform an ETH PoW fork that bypasses the weight bomb, a mechanism that drastically reduces the block reward for miners to discourage them from trying to produce more blocks (thereby forcing migration to the channel proof of role). A weight bomb will immediately precede the main mesh merge. As it is obviously possible to speculate on anything, the future value of ETHW tokens is already being traded. It climbed to $150 and stands at $62.20 at the time of writing.
Galaxy Digital made another splash in the crypto industry in an already rich quarter. The firm led by billionaire Mike Novogratz announced on Monday that it was ending a deal it had offered to buy cryptocurrency custodian BitGo for $1.2 billion. According to Galaxy, the firm exercised its right to terminate the previously announced purchase agreement “after BitGo failed to submit, by July 31, 2022, audited financial statements for 2021 that meet the requirements of our agreement.” It’s hard not to see the parallels with Elon Musk’s recent speech and the purchase of the Twitter network. This transaction was announced in May 2021, in a completely different market context. It is quite possible that what seemed attractive 15 months ago, now represented a burden for the company, so the latter was looking for a way out. If Galaxy has announced that no exit fees are planned, BitGo doesn’t intend to stop there. The asset custodian has indeed announced that it will seek $100 million or more in damages from the investment firm for pulling out of the purchase agreement. According to BitGo, the merger agreement was not due to expire until the end of this year. She hired the law firm Quinn Emanuel to sue Galaxy Digital. “It is common knowledge that Galaxy reported a $550 million loss last quarter, its stock is underperforming, and Galaxy and Mr. Novogratz are distracted by the Luna fiasco,” Quinn Emanuel associate R. Brian Timmons said in a statement Monday. “Either Galaxy owes BitGo $100 million in outage compensation as promised, or it acted in bad faith and risks damages of an equivalent or greater amount.”
Almost five years ago, in September 2017, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon publicly stated that he would fire any trader from the firm who was trading “the fraud that is bitcoin”. Today, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have become a multi-billion revenue stream for JPMorgan, which now has a research team dedicated to the space. While JPMorgan’s support for the industry is crystal clear today, what is less remembered is that the world’s largest asset manager simultaneously claimed that bitcoin was a “money laundering index.”
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” says the popular proverb. Blackrock blogged Thursday about the launch of a new private bitcoin trust. BlackRock said: “Bitcoin is the oldest, largest and most liquid cryptocurrency and is currently the primary focus of our customers in the cryptocurrency space. […] BlackRock is committed to providing clients with access to the investment opportunities of their choice and has launched a prompt private bitcoin trust. the trust is available to US institutional clients and seeks to track bitcoin’s performance minus costs and liabilities trust“. If we’ve been talking about the rise of institutional investment for years, there couldn’t be a clearer manifestation than the arrival of Blackrock. As former CEO of Grayscale Barry Silbert commented: “Here comes Wall Street…”.
According to the Financial Times, during the final months of “normal” operation of Celsius, CEO Alex Mashinsky would “take control” of the strategy trading companies as rumors surfaced in January that the US Federal Reserve was planning to raise interest rates. The man allegedly ordered the sale of “hundreds of millions of dollars” of BTC at once, before buying them back at a loss less than 24 hours later. The outlet quoted a person familiar with the matter as saying that Celsius’ CEO was “convinced of the magnitude of the market’s decline” and wanted staff to “start de-risking” in any way possible ahead of the Fed meeting. The Celsius network has definitely been on a slippery slope since filing for bankruptcy in July. Recently filed court documents reveal that Celsius will run out of money by October. In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Sunday, Celsius said it expects to reach negative cash by October 2022, amounting to approximately $34 million. Still, speculators seem to remain eternally optimists. The CEL token price reached $4.74 this week, after dropping to just $0.09.
Despite the current bear market, bitcoin recently set new highs. According to data from Glassnode, bitcoin now has more than one billion unique addresses participating in transactions, a new all-time record for the asset. This figure is even more impressive when compared to the 158 million and 148 million unique addresses participating in Ethereum and Litecoin transactions, respectively. Another highlight of bitcoin is that its network is calculated to have transacted approximately $62 trillion worth of BTC in the last 12 months.
In the short term, we are looking at both the 30-day and 200-week moving averages for bitcoin, with both indicators pointing to the $23,200-$23,000 area. It is important to stay north of these levels to hope for a real test of $25,000, as apparent resistance could not be broken during the week, despite the strength of US stocks.
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Disclaimer: This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of CryptonewsFR and does not constitute investment advice or trading instructions..
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