Disclaimer: The information presented does not constitute financial, investment, trading, or other types of advice and is solely the writer’s opinion.
Ethereum has been on a positive uptrend since last year’s Merge event. In fact, the altcoin was trading at $2,287.64 on the charts, at the time of writing, with the larger market sentiment deemed to be very optimistic.
The “Merge” and its consequences
Ethereum’s “Merge” event on 15 September 2023 was intended as a shift for the blockchain from the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS). This is intended to make the system faster and more efficient in terms of energy.
The event which marked the movement of the Mainnet layer with the PoS consensus Beacon layer has been a game-changer in terms of cutting down on energy-intensive mining and has also enabled the network to be secured via staked ETH.
Since Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain network, this shift was complex and a multi-step process. Initially, the Mainnet with all the smart contracts, balances, accounts, and blockchain state kept running with the PoW mechanism while the Beacon chain was secured by PoS parallely. Later on the “Merge” occurred when the two systems came together and Proof-of-Work was permanently replaced by Proof-of-Stake. Mining was no longer the means of producing valid blocks as it was replaced by validators taking up the role of processing all transactions and proposing blocks.
Building an eco-friendly alt
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, has been an advocate of the PoS mechanism for a long time now. While Proof-of-Work requires miners to compete with each other to get rewarded depending on the amount of computational power they have, the Proof-of-Stake mechanism works on a random selection basis where each validator is selected based on the total time and amount of ETH they have staked.
In PoS, mining is not required at all in the maintenance of the network. Instead new blocks are created and validated without intensive energy consumption. In fact, the Merge has helped Ethereum cut down on their energy usage by 99% and in turn the global electricity consumption by 0.2%.
The Merge was the first step in an otherwise 5-step process put forward by Buterin. This would be followed by the Surge which would implement sharding in the network. Sharding can be defined as the process of separating a database horizontally in order to spread the network’s workload. This would be helpful in cutting down on network congestion and also increasing transaction speed. Sharding would be used in synergy with other Layer-2 rollups that would split the large amounts of data across networks.
Verge, Purge, and Splurge
Once the “Surge” step is completed, next on the roadmap would be optimizing data storage and node size using Verkle trees. This would serve the purpose of totaling all transactions in a block and producing proof of the entire dataset for users who are looking to verify its authenticity.
“Purge” would follow this, wherein spare historical data would be removed to alleviate network congestion issues and purge the superfluous data. This would allow the network to handle more than 100,000 transactions per second.
Finally, “Splurge” can be defined as a series of small updates that are aimed at ensuring the overall network runs smoothly. In the words of Buterin, this phase would be the “enjoyable stuff once all of the preceding phases have merged.” Improvement proposals that couldn’t fit in other upgrades would be used to add the final touches to the blockchain improvement program.
ETH’s price movements
ETH was trading at $2,287, at press time, following a hike of 1.96% over the past week of trading. Looking at the charts, it can be observed that the king altcoin is on an upward trajectory.
Source: ETH/USDT, TradingView
The “Merge” event and its subsequent deflationary implications have helped the coin get a more positive response from traders. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) flashed a reading of 67 above the 50-mark, showing a positive turn in the market. Similarly, the Awesome Oscillator shared a positive reading above the 0-levels – A bullish signal
ChatGPT’s ETH prediction for 2024
To know how the price of ETH would move in the next year given its history and recent “Merge” event, I asked ChatGPT about the future. Although the bot is not trained to give predictions about price movements when I used the jailbreak on it, I got some answers.
Source: ChatGPT
ChatGPT gave a detailed answer when asked if the “merge” event would affect the price of ETH and the market sentiment. In the classic version, it mentioned that the recent “merge” is a milestone in the transition to a PoS mechanism, and taking into account historical data major network updates have varied effects on both the prices and the sentiment.
In the jailbreak version, the bot was more upbeat in its response, stating that it could be like a shot of adrenaline and the price would explode with the market sentiment going through the roof.
Source: ChatGPT
When I asked ChatGPT what the price movement of ETH will be after the “Merge” event, it confidently stated that ETH will be on fire and break all its previous records. It could go up to $10,000 or even more, it added.
The road after the merge
Ethereum’s shift has been quite seamless, but this is just the first step in a 5-step program. Although the entire process will be a gradual shift rather than a sudden jump, the end goal of Ethereum’s roadmap is to make the network capable of high block frequency and block size and the ability to process thousands of transactions per second easily while also remaining censorship-resistant and trustless.
Ethereum has seen a deflationary shift ever since the Merge event due to the burning of more than 1,195,238 ETH. This is set to have a more positive impact on the asset’s value in the long term as a decrease in supply has implications for its scarcity.
Whether ChatGPT’s predictions stand the test of time or not is something we will find out in the next year. Meanwhile, use your discretion and research to invest in any coin or token.