The merge has come… and gone. The event the cryptoverse was waiting with bated breath has gone down in the annals of history as just another event that failed to lift the market out of the slump.
But to call the event a failure would be a gross injustice, no different in fact from the overinflated hype that many had created around the event.
The Merge successfully helped move Ethereum away from the proof of stake model, eliminating mining on the network and significantly reducing its environmental impact. However, it did not deliver on any of the positive price movements that many experts had predicted. If anything, Ethereum, and the broader crypto market have only dipped since the event.
In the run-up to the Merge, Matti, one of the co-founders of the private investment firm, Zee Prime Capital, had expressed doubts about the event having any significant impact on the price of the crypto.
Another voice of caution was that of billionaire and Ethereum investor Mark Cuban, who called it a “non-event”. Cuban stressed Ethereum’s strength and real value are in its smart contracts capabilities.
In fact, there are few who’d argue that there’s more to Ethereum than just Ether, the cryptocurrency. Ethereum’s utility comes from its use as a platform that developers use to host non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and a whole gamut of decentralized apps (dApps), which is the driving force that powers the decentralized finance (DeFi) economy.
It is because of this very reason that anyone who isn’t selling crypto snake oil will tell you why they are betting on Ethereum in the long run. The Merge might have failed to bring about any immediate change, but it has helped Ethereum make a successful transition towards sustaining itself in the long run.
Talking about the long-term, in a report issued early last month, crypto research firm FSInsight didn’t mince words when it said the Merge could help the crypto eclipse Bitcoin in market capitalization over the next 12 months.
Anyone who wasn’t blinded by the hype could probably tell the Merge would in fact reflect negatively on the price of the crypto. According to data assembled by OKLink, soon after the Merge, Ether miners had started dumping their stash, leading to a drop in the crypto’s price.
But it is Ethereum’s rich smart-contract-enabled ecosystem that’ll propel it forward in the long run. To that end, the Merge has only given Ethereum more wings thanks to the increased throughput and decreased transaction costs, which will help it scale in the long run.
“This is the first step in Ethereum’s big journey towards being a very mature system, but there are still steps left to go,” Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin said during a public video call where developers tracked live progress on the switch. “To me, the merge just symbolizes the difference between early stage Ethereum, and the Ethereum we’ve always wanted…to become.”
