We’re in a post-merge world, and the lessons keep arriving. As it turns out, the mythical Merge was a sell-the-news event for Ethereum. Technically, the event was a success and Ethereum kept a 100% uptime as optimistically predicted. Economically, the asset has been bleeding for the whole post-merge season. As a result, Ethereum lost ground against bitcoin, and bitcoin dominance is back up.
Let’s go to Arcane Research’s The Weekly Update for the exact stats and numbers:
“Since the merge, Ether (ETH) is down 17% in USD and down 13% compared to BTC, with ETHBTC currently trading at 0.07. ETH has found support at 0.07 ETHBTC, which represents the average ETHBTC price over the last 365 days.”
Will this become a tendency or are these just the post-merge jitters?
The Post-Merge Post-Mortem
For a rational analysis, let’s quote The Weekly Update:
“Ether traded idly after the merge, and volatility remained low until U.S. markets opened down. The ETH blow was related to a correlated environment to risk assets, but excess leverage from long traders contributed to exacerbating Ether’s relative underperformance versus BTC.”
And the fact of the matter is that the old adage “buy the rumor, sell the news” applies perfectly here. Fuelled by hype, Ethereum’s price ballooned before the event. It was still far away from its all-time high of around $4,8K, but $1.7K was great for the market we’re in. The asset outperformed bitcoin and threatened its dominance. It was overbought, though. Post-merge, people sold and ETH is now in a downtrend. Textbook behavior that shouldn’t surprise a soul.
The chart to watch, though, is that of Ethereum’s issuance. The main difference between the post-merge Ethereum and its predecessor is that the new coin will be much more scarce. And that could affect the price tremendously.
ETH price chart for 09/21/2022 on Bittrex | Source: ETH/USD on TradingView.com
State Of The Ethereum Forks
One of the drivers of the pre-merge rally was the expectation that there might be forks and there might be airdrops. Two brand new Ethereum forks emerged from the messy situation. Those two suffered the most during this post-merge period. Back to The Weekly Update:
“Ether has not struggled in isolation, Ether forks have experienced severe headwinds, and both ETHW and Poloniex’s competitor fork EthereumFair (ETF) have seen more than two-thirds of their valuation slashed since launch.”
This brutal smackdown was to be expected. All forks generate something akin to an airdrop, as people received the equivalent to the ETH they had in ETHW and ETF. Users exchanged that free money for harder currencies pretty fast. And now it’s time for those forks, who the all-powerful stablecoins don’t support, to prove their worth.
An older fork was also in the news because of the merge and has been struggling as much as its cousins.
“Ethereum Classic has also underperformed versus ETH. Amid the merge, many miners migrated to ETC, leading ETC’s hashrate to peak at 300 TH/s. However, as the difficulty has increased in ETC, the hashrate in ETC has declined to 186 TH/s”
Some people thought that Ethereum Classic, who remains a Proof-Of-Work blockchain, was going to thrive post-merge. So far, they’ve been proven wrong. But we’re in the early innings and things might drastically change for old reliable Ethereum Classic.
ETHBTC price chart on Binance | Source: The Weekly Update
Conclusions
Apparently, the merge was a success but the price didn’t hear the news. However, we should take into account that September is usually a bad month for cryptocurrencies in general. That, mixed with the classic “buy the rumor, sell the news” behavior have ETH against the ropes. For now.
