The highly-awaited upgrade on Ethereum ‘The Merge’ will soon be launched. Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin has already shared his excitement on the upgrade. But, is the protocol actually prepared for this upgrade? Though the price action of top altcoin says so, the Ethereum utility is connected to the Web3.0 sector. Being the largest altcoin, Ethereum leads other crypto asset projects in the market.
To the unfamiliar, ‘The Merge’ is the transition of the protocol from PoW to PoS. It is expected to launch on September 19. It is being hailed as the biggest evolution for the Ethereum network. The hype resulted in Ethereum positioning itself as the leader among other altcoins in July. Its native token, Ether, has performed quite well.
According to the data released on Nansen, WETH continues to be the smart money’s favorite token. Since Mid-April, the demand for WETH has increased tremendously. Most of smart money are HODLers, holding the tokens for 1-2 years.
The number of unique addresses have gone from 150k to 490k in just a period of 1 year. This is a great win for Ethereum as the crypto market has experienced quite a turbulence in this period.
Investors also seem to be quite confident about the Merge as the staking reach soared high. Currently, there are around 13.2 million ETH ($21.6 billion) in staking deposits. Lido Finance and Kraken are running at the front with 4.1 Million and 1.1 Million, respectively, out of 77.7K unique depositors.
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However, the supply on exchanges continues to be a significant indicator for trader sentiment. In just five months, ETH has received outflows from exchanges for a balance of 24.6M ETH to 22.2M ETH.
Ethereum is also dominating the other cryptocurrencies in terms of DeFi. Ethereum has defeated all its Layer-1 competitors in TVL. At the time of writing, Ethereum has a 65.32% market share with $58 billion in TVL. BSC comes next with $6.7 billion TVL.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/08/07/is-ethereum-ready-for-the-merge-tell-these-indicators/