Ethereum Merge: The Key Events That May Determine ETH Price Reaction

As we near the Ethereum merge, what scenarios will affect ETH sentiment, bullish or bearish, and what can be used to determine the success of the merge？

The Goerli testnet merge (the last testnet) was successful, which paved the way for further gains in ETHUSD. Ethereum is due to transition from proof of work to proof of stake in mid-September, which has been the catalyst for the recent market sentiment.

Exploring ETH options open interest is providing a glance into investors' expectations:

Ethereum options open interest rose significantly, which is reflecting the renewed interest in the cryptocurrency. The top strike prices for the call options at the time of writing are $3,000 (ETH 407,730), $3,500 (ETH 323,570) and $4,000 (ETH 387,730).

The debate among crypto analysts is whether Ethereum's recent gains are a result of buying the rumour, selling the news or the merge will indeed be the starting point of a larger bullish retracement.

Ethereum merge predictions are mixed, it is important to understand what is affecting the price and what events are seen as bearish and bullish.

Before diving into the possible scenarios; it is important to be aware that exchanges may pause ether deposits and withdrawals during the merge, which will take place in September 2022.

Coinbase Will Pause ETH Deposits and Withdrawals

Compound Labs Co-Founder, Robert Leshner described the merge as swapping a spaceship's engine in mid-flight. As the merge takes place, increased activities in bots are likely to take place.

Coinbase is concerned that the becon merge may not be as smooth as expected, announcing that it will pause ETH and ERC-20 token deposits and withdrawals during the merge.

During the Merge, Coinbase will briefly pause new Ethereum (ETH) and ERC-20 token deposits and withdrawals as a precautionary measure.

Although the Merge is expected to be seamless from a user perspective, this downtime allows us to ensure that the transition has been successfully reflected by our systems.

“We do not expect any other networks or currencies to be impacted and expect no impact to trading for ETH and ERC-20 tokens across our centralized trading products.”

source: coinbase

Some are expecting other crypto exchanges to follow suit. When Luna 2.0 was released, Terra Classic validators were reporting the price of Luna 2.0 by error.

Terra classic was trading at $0.0013 while Luna 2.0 was trading at $9.83. Validators were running an old version of the oracle software, which led to the exploit.

Pools were drained as a result; millions of dollars were earned by bad actors that exploited the ecosystem.

Layer 2 Scaling Solutions May Prevail

Ethereum layer 2 solutions such as Polygon (Matic), Optimism (OP) and Arbitrum (Arbitrum has no token) may continue prevailing despite Ethereum's transition to proof of stake.

Over the past year, ETH gained $9.9 billion in revenue compared to a total of $78 million on the above layer 2 mainnets. The merge may cause some volatility as at the time of writing, ETH layer 2 Web 3.0 solutions were highly correlated to the ether price.

The parent company of Mercedes Benz (Daimler Group) announced it will launch a data-sharing platform on Polygon.