Ethereum’s price rallies after adoption by a major Gulf State
The last 24 hours have seen Ethereum book profits worth 7%
- Ethereum's market dominance index (DI) currently stands at 20.2%.
- The United Arab Emirates is all set to commemorate its upcoming National Day by releasing 4 NFTs.
- Developers expect the Ethereum network to make its long-awaited transition to ETH2.0 by the end of Q2 2022.
Despite the market reacting adversely to news of Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, stating that fears of inflation may be worse than previously imagined, Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, has continued to showcase increased bullish support, rising from AUD$6,100 to a near all-time high of AUD$6,630 over the course of the last 24 hours. At press time, ETH is trading for US$4,600.
Even though Ethereum seems to be en route to a new all-time high, retail as well as professional crypto traders seem to be quite sceptical of the ongoing rally, stating that the altcoin's perpetual contracts futures data doesn't seem to warrant the current rise. In fact, even after ETH rose by 17% over the last 96 hours, traders across prominent exchanges such as Huobi and OKEx proceeded to decrease their long positions, indicating that they may be a bit suspicious of the ongoing market action.
That said, crypto adoption seems to be proceeding as usual across the globe, with the United Arab Emirates recently revealing that it will continue with its pro-crypto approach in the foreseeable future. The Middle Eastern country plans to issue a number of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to commemorate its National Day.
NFT stamps will be released on 2 December and will be sold as digital collectibles that will in turn be linked with their physical counterparts. In all, there will be 4 stamps that will make their way into the market, with each one representing a unique nationalistic theme.
ETH2.0 transition inches closer by the day
A number of core Ethereum (ETH) developers have sent out an official request to members of the project's massive community of backers to help out with the testing of Ethereum's transition to the proof-of-stake (PoS) framework. Once the merger concludes, ETH will be able to decrease its energy consumption ratio by 99% as well as mitigate many of its ongoing transactional bottlenecks.
For example, in its current iteration, the Ethereum network is able to facilitate anywhere from 15-45 transactions per second. Furthermore, over the last 3-4 weeks, the network has seen its gas fee rates continue to hover at AUD$60 (US$45), making it extremely difficult for smaller retail-based traders to make use of the network.
What lies ahead?
As per data available online, ETH's transition to 2.0 (referred to as Beacon Chain) is set to conclude sometime over the first half of 2022. The merger is being referred to as the "final piece in the PoS puzzle" that the Ethereum network is currently struggling with. Also, developers expect Shard chains to be incorporated into the network's framework by late 2022, allowing for even more transactional efficiency.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner's guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
