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The father of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, announced the successful Ethereum upgrade on his Twitter account. Source: https://ethereum.org/en/
The Ethereum Merge has been completed to finally welcome a more eco-friendly proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism, saying goodbye to proof-of-work (PoW). But does the post-Merge era indicate that the blockchain will knock down the so-called “Ethereum killers” including Solana, Cardano, TRON and beyond due to the energy reduction?
Debunk the myth of lower gas fees
When the father of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, tweeted: “And we finalized! Happy merge all,” on September 15 at around 1600 EST, it indicated that the Merge was complete successfully and the Ethereum community would officially embrace a new era of a more secure, scalable and sustainable PoS mechanism.
vitalik.eth on Twitter: "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. / Twitter"
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.
Although Ethereum is often criticized for its environmental impact along with its slow speed and high transaction fees because of the increasing number of users over the past 7 years, the Merge will reduce the overall energy consumption to 99.9%. However, the gas fees, which are the payments to proceed, and validate transactions on the blockchain, and the speed remain unchanged and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) has reiterated many times on its official website. Having said that, “Ethereum killers” can still compete with Ethereum in some ways, so the simplest answer to the headline is “NO” because the Merge, unfortunately, can’t fix the two main issues, low speed and high transaction fees, of the Ethereum blockchain yet.
The Merge doesn’t drive up ETH
As for the price of Ether (ETH), the native token of Ethereum, the Merge doesn’t drive up its price even if the token surged 50% over the previous three months according to Forkcast.News. ETH is now trading at $1,589 by press time as a result of macro factors including a hot inflation report in August.
Despite the price drops, Justin d’Anethan from Amber Group predicted that ETH’s future trajectory would be futile until further developments when he talked to the aforesaid media site. Meanwhile, Tim Beiko, the core developer of EF, thought that the Merge would genuinely get those who were interested in the network yet with skepticism about the environmental impacts together for an experiment when he spoke to CoinDesk earlier.
More than 41,000 people were tuned in on YouTube to join “Ethereum Mainnet Merge Viewing Party” to witness the historic moment in the community together. Source: Twitter
Google has changed the panda graphic soon after the completion of the Merge. Source: Google
“Ethereum killers” that crypto investors should know
Dubbed as the “World Computer” with its smart contract and DeFi (Decentralized finance) functionalities, Ethereum allows developers to build DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and dApp (Decentralized Application) to house a $60 billion ecosystem of cryptocurrency exchanges, lending companies, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces and other apps according to CoinDesk.
Therefore, the Merge is regarded as one of the historic moment in the community as well as in the crypto space to signal the end of PoW and to replace miners with validators.
While the world is still watching closely about the future developments of Ethereum, crypto enthusiasts also want to see whether the transaction speed and gas fees of Ethereum will change after the Merge.
Meanwhile, crypto investors should also pay attention to the following “Ethereum killers”, which are building up momentum with the potential to occupy the NFT market share, although the tokens might not be able to replace ETH anytime soon.
1. Solana (SOL)
5. Tron (TRX)
7. Near (NEAR)
8. Cosmo (ATOM)
9. Fantom (FTM)
10. Chainlink (LINK)
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The post-Merge era: will energy reduction push away “Ethereum killers”? was originally published in The Poloniex blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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