The Ethereum long-awaited Merge has been completed on Thursday as scheduled. The co-founder of the network, Vitalik Buterin has, as a matter of fact, sent a congratulatory message to the Ethereum community on the landmark achievement. But in a counter-twist of what was supposed to happen, Ethereum’s price began to decline somewhat sharply.

Acting Against Expectations

Following the appearance of two red candles, which were small, the token showed a bigger candle on the hour. In all, Ethereum has lost up to 9% of its price value as of the time of this report as it dropped from $1,636 and currently trading at $1,478.

The founder of Capriole Investments, Charles Edwards, took to his Twitter page after the Merge on Thursday and said many observers are referring to the Merge as an event to sell the news. Edwards stated further that he hopes that would not just be the case as he firmly believes the Ethereum Merge is an event halving Ethereum.

Now that the movement to the proof-of-stake protocol has been concluded, it will take less energy to have Ethereum supply in circulation. 

Moskovski Capital’s CIO is of the view that the ongoing decline in Ethereum’s price is because Ethereum traders are trying to sell the news of the Ethereum Merge. But some other crypto experts are saying that Ethereum is poorly underpriced, and it is possible that a catalyst is lurking somewhere around.

The Ethereum Merger had been postponed a couple of times due to technical difficulties. It led to skepticism when a date was fixed for this just-concluded Merge. 

Understanding the New Phase

The Merge is the transitioning of Ethereum from the proof-of-work protocol on which it was built to the proof-of-stake protocol. The essence and major promise of the Merger is that it would improve the security and scalability of Ethereum. Also importantly, the proof-of-stake protocol requires much less energy consumption in its operation than the proof-of-work mechanism.

As opposed to the need for miners to mine new Ethereum blocks on the proof-of-work protocol, the proof-of-stake does not need miners. Rather, miners are replaced with validators who will validate transactions on the network henceforth.

But not every member of the Ethereum community appreciated the new arrangement. Hence, some developers on the network decided to create a fork of the original Ethereum code. This will make them have a parallel Ethereum token based on proof-of-work while the new Ethereum also works.

The past couple of weeks saw several crypto exchanges declaring their support for the Merged Ethereum when concluded. Some others said they were yet to decide if they would list the forked Ethereum.