Financial Idiot 016 - Let’s dig into Crypto! Part 4 - After “The Merge”

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DISCLAIMER: I'm an idiot and this isn't financial advice! You can lose money when investing, and you should never invest money you don't own or you can't afford to lose. I'm not responsible for your decisions!

As already announced in the last Issue, Ethereums „Merge“ is now a few weeks back. Let’s look at the outcome.

Interestingly I don’t feel like „the Merge“ had the expected impact. At least it didn’t have the effect I was hoping for. The network continued to work without a major or even a minor interruption. On Block was PoW the next one was PoS.

I also found a pretty interesting page surrounding the merge: https://ultrasound.money/. It has a few interesting statistics. I find it interesting to see how the issuance of ETH and burn rate are displayed and the fact that sometime in the future, the burn rate might exceed the issue rate. That would mean more ETH are being burned, reducing the overall supply. As far as I understand, there is only one way to counter that movement: stake more ETH because the issuance of ETH is directly dependent on the Staked ETH (more staked equals more issued).

Besides that, there was a Hardfork „ETHW“, which continues the „old“ Proof of Work Chain. Many major exchanges said they would support the fork. The price is currently around 8€ (https://coinmarketcap.com/de/currencies/ethereum-pow/) at the time of writing. I wonder how long that fork will stay „profitable“ for the Miners mining it.

Another thing that recently came up is that it is not set in stone that Users locked up ETH will be unlockable in the next update. I think I read somewhere that a Core Dev said they are not quite ready yet, and it might take more than six months to retrieve their money. I find that quite interesting because many people thought six months after the merge, they would be able to recover their staked money and then exit. With this new timeline, I’m not sure if this will be possible next year. Luckily I see Ethereum as a long-term investment, and I keep buying stETH and rETH at the staking services with my current savings plan (17€ per week).

I thought there was more to tell about „The Merge“, but whatever :)

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