1.0 Introduction

Recently , the ETH Merge occurred on Sept 15th. It is one of the ETH Upgrade mentioned in their roadmap. It is meant for migrating the Ethereum blockchain from PoW(Proof of Work) to (Proof of Stake) . This is one of the effort to further decentralize the network.

The crypto community, anticipated this event. Some thinks its a buying opportunity as it , while others view it as the “sell the news” event.

In this analytics , I will attempt to answer whether The Merge is a Buying Event or Selling event

2.0 Scope

This analytics considers WETH to measure ETH purchase/sell asset.

The stablecoins considered in this analytics are DAI, USDC and USDT

3.0 Definition

The term Buying here is defined as a swap event where an address uses Stablecoin to buy ETH.

For ‘Selling’, it is used to define when a swap event where an address uses ETH to sell for stable coin

This is because, users who are trying to sell eth, are intending to mitigate their exposure from ETH Volatility . Therefroe, logically, only event that rotates from ETH to stablecoin should be considered as Selling event as stablecoins protects users from ETH volatility.

The same can be said for buying. Users who are trying to buy ETH, are looking for exposure in ETH price action. Therefore , only swap event from stablecoin to ETH should be considered.

Although the case can be made that users use other capital such as wBTC to swap for ETH. However this is not considered in order to make acute comparison between selling and buying between eth an stablecoins

How many buyers/sellers are there approaching The Merge date?

”The negative Number indicates seller, it is meant to differentiate the dynamics of buyer/seller”

The chart shows the comparison of the number of Buyer vs Seller per Day towards the Merge date on Sept 15th.

On the Merge date, there are 8.56 K Unique WETH Buyers, and there are 10.24 K Unique WETH sellers.

Based on these metric , the merge date has shown to attract more sellers than buyers.

The total number of Buyers up to the Merge date is at 58.3K unique address, while there are 66.8k Unique address that has sold their WETH.

From this, we can say that this is a more of a selling event based on number of Buyers vs Sellers. However, the difference is not too critical on the sell side

• Note that the Buying and selling is to/from stablecoins.

What is the Buying/Selling Frequency based on Txn Count up to the Merge Date?

The total WETH Buying transaction is 17.2K on The Merge date, while the Selling transaction reports at 17.9 K. A slight difference of 700 txns.

Up to the merge date, the total Buying transaction 191 K , as opposed to the Selling transaction at 192K.

Based on transaction Frequency, the transaction counts reports slight difference of 700 and 1K respectively.

Therefore, we can say, the buying/selling activity of WETH are about the same, with negligible difference leaning on the sell side

ETH Sold by Miners

From Sept 1st to Sept 21st, there are only 40 unique Miner address that sells WETH. That is, using Swap function to sell WETH for stablecoins.

Sept 15th, the Merge Date, reports the highest number of Unique Miners selling ETH. However, the highest Volume of ETH sold per day is on Sept 19th, at 715.9 ETH. In total, since Sept 1st, 1661 ETH has been sold.

This number is insignificant compared to overall Selling/Buying activities reported earlier, hence we can say, in terms of Swap functions, Miners selling activity does not yield significant impact.

The low number of ETH selling by miners may make sense, if we considered that Miners may sell the ETHs at CEX. This is due to certain exchanges are supporting ETHW network, and ETH holders will receive airdrop on their CEX wallet.