Second largest coin has recaptured price level it lost week ago, and mid-sized investors keep flowing in
Influencer David Gokhshtein, founder of Gokshtein Media and CEO of PAC Protocol, has taken to Twitter to draw the attention of the community to the fact that the second largest token, Ethereum, reclaimed the $1,700 level it lost on August 19th. has risen to.
In the meantime, the number of large Ethereum wallets has been increasing as well, while the long-expected Merge upgrade is coming closer. Over the past week, Ethereum has surged by nearly 4%.
Merge date confirmed by ETH Dev
A week ago, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko confirmed that the merge is expected to take place on September 15, as previously announced. However, on August 12, Vitalik Buterin said in a tweet that the exact date depends on the Ethereum hash rate.
As a reminder, the Merge will be the last step toward Ethereum switching to a proof-of-stake protocol, leaving proof-of-work and its massive energy consumption behind for Ethereum. Thus, ETH expected to become more scarce (as there will be no more miners, and coins will be minted more seldom) and more environmentally friendly, unlike the leading crypto, Bitcoin.
The number of ETH wallets with more than 100 coins increased
The Glassnode analytics company has reported that several key records have been set by the Ethereum ecosystem in the past 24 hours. In particular, medium-sized investors keep flocking, and now the volume of wallets holding more than 100 Ether has reached a 16-month high of 45,615.
Similarly, the number of non-zero ETH wallets has demonstrated a rise to a new all-time high of 85,410,502.
Sentiment on-chain data aggregator tweeted that the amount of Ethereum held in the top 10 exchange wallets and non-exchange wallets is slowly increasing before the merger, and the gap is closing.
Since May 10, according to a recent tweet, the 10 biggest ETH wallets that do not belong to centralized exchanges have dropped 11% of the Ethereum they held previously. As for exchange-based wallets, they have increased their stashes by a whopping 78%.
Mark Cuban ETH . But “Super Bullish” remains
Mark Cuban, a “converted” crypto pro-billionaire and investor, said in a recent interview that he remains “super bullish” on Ethereum in the long run. Their bullish forecast is again tied to the upcoming merge event.
He believes that it will increase Ethereum’s utility, thus strengthening the bullish case of the second biggest blockchain platform and its native token, ETH.
As was mentioned above, the merge is going to significantly reduce the energy consumption of Ethereum – notably by a factor of 1,000. However, Cuban refrained from making any specific price predictions as he does not know how the ETH rate will react to the merge in the near term.
Aside from Ethereum, Mark Cuban also supports Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The Mavericks team that he owns sells tickets and merchandise for DOGE in their online store. He holds DOGE himself, but the size of his stash is not too big.
