Upgrade Still ‘Not Priced In’ — Ethereum Co-Founder Issues Shock Price Prediction Amid Huge Bitcoin, BNB, XRP, Solana, Cardano, Dogecoin Rally

Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, has led the broader crypto price rally this month as excitement builds ahead of the much-hyped upgrade.

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The Ethereum price, after falling below $1,000 per ether in June, has shot around 70% to over $17,000 – fueling a crypto price boom that has helped bitcoin climb convincingly above $20,000, and further supported by growing expectations of a “sharp” Federal Reserve U-turn.

Now, ethereum’s co-founder and the project’s spiritual leader Vitalik Buterin has said he still doesn’t think ethereum’s long-awaited merger upgrade has been fully “priced in” — predicting that “when the merger happens, morale will go way up.”

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“I basically expect that the merger is going to be kind of, not priced in, by that I don’t even mean just in market terms, but even just in psychological and narrative terms,” ​​Buterin told the host of the Youtube show Bankless David Hoffman at the Ethereum Community Conference last week, referring to both ethereum developer trust as well as the ethereum price.

Despite the recent ethereum price rally, ether is still down about 60% from its record high of nearly $5,000 set late last year. The Bitcoin price has also crashed a similar amount from its peak.

Ethereum’s radical merger upgrade, written in mid-September, will see the network switch away from bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism to the more power-efficient proof-of-stake, which allows ethereum holders to “stake” their ether to secure the network in return for newly minted coins. Ethereum rivals such as Binance’s BNB, solana and cardano all use proof-of-stake or some variant of it.

The switch to proof-of-stake will make the ethereum network 99% more environmentally friendly, according to the Ethereum Foundation.

Meanwhile, staking is predicted to have a deflationary effect on Ethereum as people lock up their coins, suppressing supply as demand increases. Ethereum started to become deflationary last year, with more coins being “burned” than distributed to so-called miners who verify transactions on the blockchain.

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Last week, Buterin revealed his plans for ethereum after the “merge” upgrade – with “surge” next in a series of improvements designed to make the network more secure and decentralized.

Speaking at the Ethereum Community Conference, Buterin said that ethereum will further change its monetary policy after the merger upgrade, with the annual issuance of ether expected to be cut by as much as 90%.

Cryptocurrency crash of the year, wiping $2 trillion from the combined bitcoin, ethereum, BNBGDP
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, the solana, cardano and dogecoin market, has come after two manic years for the crypto community that have seen the price of many major coins hit never-before-seen highs. Price-driven crypto hype has led to sky-high expectations for the technology, according to Buterin.

“[Market booms] attract a lot of people and get people excited, which is good, but they give people far too much of an impression of what the space promises, Buterin said Bankless.