We are now less than 2 days away from The Merge and the excitement of the community is reaching a fever pitch. As I’m sure you’re all aware of by now, Google engineers created a merge countdown timer (with the pandas!) that comes up if you search “the merge” or “ethereum merge”. And just today The Merge was featured on the front page of the Financial Times - I think it’s safe to say that the world is watching The Merge.

sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 @sassal0x

The pandas are touching 👀👀👀

September 13th 2022

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We all know how monumental of an event The Merge is and how important it is for Ethereum - but that’s because you’re subscribed to this newsletter about Ethereum and spend too much time on ‘crypto twitter’. Usually, network upgrades like The Merge come and go with little fanfare from anyone but Ethereans (EIP-1559 being a notable exception) but this time around it is distinctly different - The Merge is entering the mainstream consciousness and Ethereum is getting a lot of positive attention because of it.

Due to this more mainstream nature of The Merge, there has been plenty of attention on 2 things - the massive 99.95% energy reduction and the equally massive issuance reduction. The former is of interest because climate change is extremely topical and crypto has come under heavy scrutiny for its energy use for a while now. The latter is obviously interesting to people because it’s something they can speculate on and something they may stand to gain from (if they hold ETH, of course).

There are of course plenty of other positives that come with The Merge but I don’t think the mainstream media has or will clue into most of them. A big one (at least to me), is the fact that The Merge is a huge derisking event for Ethereum and shows that even though Ethereum is a large network, it can still execute incredibly complex upgrades that involve many different moving parts. Then there’s also the fact that ETH staking yields will go up post-merge since validators get fees and MEV in addition to the propose/attest rewards.

All in all, it’s an exciting time for Ethereum to be on the world stage. Given the recent energy crisis in Europe and the subsequent skyrocketing energy prices around the world, there’s never been a better time for Ethereum to be moving to Proof of Stake. If you wanted to, you could even argue that The Merge happening in a bear market is much healthier for ETH’s price since the impact will be relatively muted (imagine if we were merging in a bull market) - though for now I’ll leave the speculation to the speculators.

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.