Ethereum merge piques investor interest as eth price rises
Ethereum's 'merge' upgrade was a success and early morning trading showed that it has already piqued investor interest with the price of ether steadily rising.
The world's second-largest blockchain by market cap had its most important upgrade to date, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced it was a success.
On Twitter, Buterin announced: "And we finalized! Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today."
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The successful upgrade to a new way of validating transactions that uses over 99% less electricity seems to have kick-started a crypto-market rally.
Ethereum (ETH-USD) is up 2% in the last 24 hours to $1,640 and bitcoin (BTC-USD) increased 0.2% to stand at $20,298.
The upgrade, which developers say will pave the path for Ethereum to become more secure and scalable, was celebrated on YouTube, with over 41,000 people tuning into the "Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party".
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The 'merge' has so far been successful without glitches with node validators, the operators of Ethereum’s new proof-of-stake network, behaving as expected and writing new transactions to the blockchain’s ledger.
The Ethereum merge involved a complex network transition from the high energy consumption proof of work way of validating transactions, to the relatively low energy use proof of stake method.
With the proof of stake consensus mechanism, a vast amount of computing power is no longer needed to support transactions and the minting of new units of the cryptocurrency.
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