Following news of the Ethereum (ETH) “Difficulty Bomb” delay, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has slumped further in value.
Ethereum’s price has plummeted as low as $1,662 in the last 24 hours after news surfaced that the blockchain developers would be postponing the implementation of the code to a later date.
Yesterday, developers of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization resolved that Ethereum’s difficulty bomb code implementation would be delayed in order to fix some of the bugs discovered when the Merge upgrade was run on the Ropsten testnet network.
The execution of the difficulty bomb code is part of an effort planned to make mining ETH difficult in a bid to slowly push crypto miners off the blockchain as developers prepare for Ethereum’s transition from its current proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
ETH Current Price In Line With Brandt’s Prediction
Meanwhile, the slump of Ethereum’s market value moments after news of the difficulty bomb delay seemed to correspond with bearish predictions by veteran futures trader Peter Brandt earlier this week.
Brandt predicted that Ethereum will likely be heading to around $1,200 in the coming days or weeks, setting its target around $1,268. The chart shared by Brandt portrayed a descending triangle of the cryptocurrency within the range of $1,200.
For Brandt, Ethereum investors could see the price of the second-largest cryptocurrency dip that low unless it is quickly nullified.
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading at $1,676, down 6.6% in the last 24 hours.
Implications of “Difficulty Bomb” Delay
While many investors expected some sort of positive news from the cryptocurrency, they were informed yesterday that the difficulty bomb code implementation would be delayed, thus plunging the price of ETH.
It is worth noting that the ETH difficulty bomb is an integral part of Ethereum’s push to the long-awaited 2.0 upgrade. Once the code is implemented, it will become evident that the launch of the Merge, the fusion of the PoW and PoS chains is close.
Although Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, disclosed last month that the Merge upgrade will go live in August, delaying the difficulty bomb and suggesting that the Merge launch will be further pushed to a later date.
Meanwhile, Ethereum developers assured its community that the delay of the difficulty bomb would have no implication on the timing of the Merge.
Commenting on the development, Tim Beiko, Ethereum’s developer’s coordinator, shared his concerns about the implication of trying to launch the Merge upgrade in earnest without delaying the difficulty bomb for a longer time.
“If we do delay this, I think it should be a realistic delay to still maintain a sense of urgency. But too much pressure pushes teams to burn out, that’s also a situation we don’t want to be in,” Beiko said.
