Cryptoverse: Ether prepares for epic ‘merge’ in quest to eclipse bitcoin
Categories: US ETHERUM NEWS
The No.2 cryptocurrency was supposed to be weeks away from the “merge”, a transformative June upgrade of its blockchain Ethereum to make it faster, cheaper and less power hungry, holding out the prospect of a meaner and cleaner crypto future.The anticipation had supported ether this year, even as inflation and monetary tightening shackled bitcoin. But that merge – which would see ether mining transition away from the energy-intensive proof-of-work method to proof-of-stake – has been delayed, frustrating investors. “The timeline for seeing this launch continues to extend,” said Brendan Playford, founder and CEO of decentralized financial data platform Masa Finance.“It’s certainly plausible that Ethereum’s highly anticipated upgrade to a proof-of-stake system could be delayed again given that this transition is highly complicated and still uncertain as to whether it can actually deliver on its promise of lowering costs and increasing transaction speeds.”Yet bitcoin remains just an investment without any real ability to be used for contracts in decentralized finance applications. For this reason, many investors believe a flipping of the market is inevitable – dubbed “the flippening” in crypto circles – with the merge acting as a catalyst for Ethereum becoming the dominant platform. Both bitcoin and ether are mined, or produced, using a proof-of-work (POW) method, where thousands of miners, or network nodes, compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles.Ethereum has long been hobbled by issues of speed and processing costs. It only processes 30 transactions per second as a proof-of-work blockchain, but expects to process as many as 100,000 transactions per second once it moves to POS.“Ethereum maxis, people who believe in ‘the flippening’, believe it will come very soon,” said Acheson at Genesis Trading. “But it is only a theory and it remains to be seen.”