Weekly Update
The global crypto market cap is down by 3.46% to $961.44B at the time of writing this article. Over the past 24 hours, the overall volume of the cryptocurrency market has decreased by 19.68% to $70.98B. In comparison to last week, the crypto market has performed poorly, with the market capitalization of crypto assets slightly decreasing.
DeFi’s total 24-hour volume is $4.89B, or 6.89% of the overall crypto market volume. All Stablecoin volume is currently $65.66B, or 92.51% of the 24-hour volume of the whole crypto market.
Bitcoin was trading at about $19707.01 at the time of writing. According to data from CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin’s market share is currently 39.35%, an increase of 0.56% from the previous day.
This week, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies underperformed, resulting in a decrease in the overall Market Capitalization of Crypto Assets, not only due to the reasons for the current crash, but also primarily due to the highly anticipated Ethereum Merge, which occurred on September 15, 2022. In a volatile market, minor corrections are healthy, and they frequently result in the asset reaching a new all-time high. This upward movement has instilled hope in investors, given the rise of Web3 and Crypto, as well as the inherent volatility of cryptocurrency trading.
With the Merge Complete, What’s Next?
Ethereum successfully transitioned to a proof-of-stake (PoS) system on Thursday. The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has fundamentally shifted to a mechanism that uses 99.95% less energy. ETH is currently trading at $1,470, a 9.63% decrease from the previous 24 hours.
However, there will be no noticeable difference for regular investors following the merger. Gas fees remain unchanged from before the merger. The transactional speed of the ETH network will also not significantly increase. Previously, mining one block of ETH took about 13 seconds, but this will be reduced to roughly 12 seconds after the merge.
Notably, the merge is only the first of five upgrades that are expected to be implemented by 2026: the surge, the verge, the purge, and the splurge. It is the next stage, the surge, that will introduce sharding into the ETH ecosystem, supercharging the Ethereum blockchain to process high volumes of transactions in seconds. Sharding will increase the speed of processing from its current capacity of 15–20 per second to 1,00,000 per second. Ethereum has a long way to go and grow, and the Merge is only the beginning.
