This week on Crypto Twitter: Ethereum merges, Hoskinson gets salty, concerns over centralized stakes

It was fusion week. Ethereum’s long-awaited overhaul was completed without a hitch, but there was no sudden influx of capital either. Ethereum’s price actually fell 8% to below $1,500 on Thursday, the day of the merger. At the time of writing, it is trading at $1,376, about 22% cheaper than it was last Sunday.

A day before the merger, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a graph from etherchain.org shows the network’s hash rate has maintained consistency, despite negative predictions from certain forecasters.

The following day, Thursday, Buterin announced the news that the network’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) was complete:

Beeple, the digital artist whose NFT collection “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” sold for an unprecedented 69.3 million dollars through a Christie’s auction, ushered in the new era with a purple vision of Ethereum mining in the future:

A blockchain developer named Miguel Piedrafita said that after the merger, Ethereum was 99.95% more energy efficient, becoming much greener than a typical tech company.

The upgrade even slightly surpassed Ethereum’s energy estimate. A report released today by the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI), commissioned by Ethereum-centric software firm ConsenSys, claims that Ethereum now uses about. 99.99% less energy after merger.

Former Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, who now heads rival Cardano — which has a market cap of $16.4 billion — felt salty. He posted a meme likening the merger to a nightmare. When someone tweeted him asking where Cardano’s technology stacks up against Ethereum, Hoskinson let loose with some blatant self-promotion:

Crypto market intelligence firm Santiment expressed a warning about how centralized Ethereum staking had become after the merger.

This was a common complaint. According to Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of the DeFi platform Gnosis, the popular crypto exchange Coinbase and the liquidity venture Lido Finance together stand for 42% of post-merger Ethereum validators, and the top seven entities control more than two-thirds of the effort that validates transactions. Köppelmann also ran a poll in which three-quarters of 15,885 respondents agreed that Coinbase and Lido’s stake dominance “must change.”

Alex Svanevik, CEO of crypto analytics company Nansen, noted a sudden huge influx of Ethereum to exchanges.

Finally, Daniel Buchner, a technical product manager at Microsoft Decentralized identity initiative, compared the merger to Groundhog Day:

Michael Saylor…

It was also a big week for MicroStrategy’s former CEO and current executive chairman Michael Saylor. It wasn’t so much what he said, but what people said about him. On Tuesday, Bitcoin enthusiast Udi Wertheimer trolled his 114.3k followers with credible fake news.

Fake or not, it would be wrong to say that Saylor isn’t considering swelling Microstrategy’s 129,699 Bitcoin war chest (worth $2.6 billion at today’s price). Last week, an SEC filing revealed that MicroStrategy has entered into an agreement with investment bank Cowen & Co. to sell up to $500 million in shares of Class A common stock. It can use the proceeds to buy more Bitcoin.

On Friday, the White House new guidance published on crypto. Billed as a “First Ever Comprehensive framework for Responsible Development of Digital Assets,” the new guidance uses the recommendations and conclusions of various government agencies after six months of studying the crypto industry.

Saylor shared a lengthy article by crypto investor Nic Carter that condemned climate study for cryptomining done by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Carter claims that the main weaknesses of the study were unreliable sources, a lack of perspectives from industry experts and no new data.

Still, Saylor doesn’t represent everyone, according to “independent Ethereum educator” Anthony Sassano.

Finally, Terra CEO Do Kwon broke his silence on Saturday after headlines emerged earlier this week saying a South Korean court had issued an arrest warrant for him for breaching the capital market rules. The Korean Ministry of Finance also announced that it was trying cancel his passport. He told followers that he is not on lamb.