The imminent Ethereum (ETH) Merge upgrade is currently driving capital inflow into the digital asset, with some industry analysts anticipating that the upgrade would boost trust in the cryptocurrency market.
Speaking with CNBC, Jess Houlgrave, the head of the crypto strategy at payment giant Checkout.com, opined that despite seeing lower trading volume on the platform, the Merge is likely to renew some confidence in the cryptocurrency market.
“On the trading side, we’re certainly seeing lower volume overall, but its still moving there’s still news moving the ecosystem. I think as we see the Ethereum Merge coming later this month that’s likely to renew some confidence in the ecosystem,” she said.
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Houlgrave also stated that there’d been an increase in the number of crypto wallet addresses on most of the major “layer one” blockchains. Despite the reduced trading volume in the market, the platform is reporting a rise in wallet addresses and the creation of more wallets. These wallets might be owned by current crypto holders or by new holders who have just entered the market.
“I think that’s actually being driven not necessarily by new traders coming online new retail traders who think of crypto as a kind of currency and investment asset but actually people who are beginning to use real-world applications of crypto including money remittance, purchasing NFTs, and other digital assets.”
Ethereum improves its market dominance
The impending Merge upgrade is seeing Ethereum cut into Bitcoin’s (BTC) market dominance as the top-ranked cryptocurrency by market capitalization as of September 6, saw its crypto market dominance drop to a four-year low, falling as low as 38.2%, while Ethereum’s market dominance climbed as high as 20.4%.
With the September event considered bullish for Ethereum, more is flowing into the asset, trading at $1,664, up 6.48% in the last 24 hours, with a total market worth of $203 billion, at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap data.
At the same time, Ethereum is also the second most trending cryptocurrency in the market, just behind Ethereum Classic (ETC), which has also seen an inflow of capital in the last 24 hours and attained an all-time high hash rate of 48 terahashes per second(TH/s), with a year-to-date growth rate of more than 480%.
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