What Is the Ethereum Merge?

• The Merge is the official name of the Ethereum blockchain's transition from PoW to PoS. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is well known for its environmental impact, requiring more power than numerous large countries to keep its blockchain up and running and secure. After switching to PoS, it is thought Ethereum will consume 99.9 percent less energy.[1]

• As gratuitous energy waste is one of the main criticisms of cryptocurrency in general and specifically NFTs (many of which are minted on the Ethereum blockchain), that the Merge will tackle one of the biggest consumers is likely to go down well across the board.

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When Did the Ethereum Merge Happen? Is the Merge Complete?

• The Ethereum Merge took place on 15 September 2022 at block 15537351
• The Merge took years of planning, but as soon as the Ethereum blockchain hit the correct Total Terminal Difficult (TTD) of 58,750,000,000,000,000,000,000, the transition was instantaneous.
• There was no pause to boot up different software or load something else, the transition was automatic.

Transactions per Block

• All the metrics are quite comparable, we don’t see much change in the number except

  we do see the maximum number of transactions per block was up to 1.4K compared to 1.3K before.

Time Difference(seconds) between two Blocks

• Minimum, Average and Medium number of quite comparable but slightly reduces after the merge.
• The Maximum difference is quite a bit low after the merge, 175 vs 55 seconds.

Number of Swaps

• Looking at the swap frequency there is not much uptick in the number of swaps after the merge.

  • The highest daily was around 100K, whereas we see a lot of days around 105K after the merge.
  • Uniswap-V2 is still the dominant swap platform, with 414K swaps before the merge and 325K swaps after the merge.
  • Uniswap-V3 is comes in second, with 234K swaps before the merge and 229K swaps after the merge.
  • This is quite odd that the top two most popular swap platforms saw a decrease in swap frequency, where as a Sushiswap on the other hand saw an increase from 55K to 63K.

  Number of Swappers

• Looking at the number of swappers there is no change in the number of swappers after the merge as well.

  • It has been consistent around 40K swappers.
  • Uniswap-V2 is still the dominant swap platform, with 137K swappers before the merge and 112K swappers after the merge.
  • Uniswap-V3 is comes in second, with 98K swappers before the merge and 92K swappers after the merge.

Overview

We look at the following metrics to answer various questions about the before and after merge.

• Number of Transactions
• Number of Users transacting
• Block Metrics
• $ETH price affected
• Number of Swaps across various platforms.
• Number of Swappers across various platforms.
• Number of NFT Sales across various platforms.
• Number of NFT Buyers across various platforms.

Methodology

• To get a comparative analysis we look at 50000 blocks both before and after the merge block 15537351
• We look at the data from ethereum.core.fact_transactions ,ethereum.core.ez_dex_swaps and ethereum.core.ez_nft_sales tables and compute various metrics to answer the questions above.
• Such as transactions frequency, swap frequency, NFT sales, etc.

Number of block before and after the merge can be updated via the parameter above

Number of Transactions

• Looking at the transaction frequency there is a slight uptick in the number of daily transactions after the merge, the numbers however seem like they are coming back to before the merge numbers.
  • The highest daily was around 1M, whereas we see a lot of days around 1.1M-1.3M after the merge.
  • In total we saw 7M transactions in 40K blocks before the merge vs 6.9M transactions in 40K blocks after the merge.

Number of Users

• Looking at the number of users there is a slight uptick in the number of users after the merge as well.
  • The highest daily was around 280K, whereas we see a lot of days around 410K after the merge.
  • Sep 17, 2022 is quite surprising with 586K active users on a day.
  • In total we saw 2.48M users in 40K blocks before the merge vs 2.26M users in 40K blocks after the merge.

Number of NFT Sales

• Looking at the NFT Sales there is slight uptick in the number of sales after the merge.

  • The highest daily was around 50K, whereas we see a lot of days around 60K after the merge.
  • Opensea is still the dominant NFT Sale platform, with 265K sales before the merge and 263K sales after the merge.
  • X2Y2 is comes in second, with 28K sales before the merge and 37K sales after the merge.

  Number of NFT Buyers

• Looking at the NFT Buyers there is slight uptick in the number of buyers after the merge.

  • The highest daily was around 20K, whereas we see a lot of days around 25K after the merge.
  • Opensea is still the dominant NFT Sale platform for buyers, with 129K before the merge and 119K sales after the merge.
  • X2Y2 is comes in second, with 17K buyers before the merge and 20K buyers after the merge.

Gas Used

• Looking at the Gas Used Numbers, there has been a reduction in the gas used per day, even though the number of transactions has increased.
• Now this very well might be due to price of ETH decreasing.
• The highest in the 40K blocks before the merge was 3.94M $USD vs 2.9M $USD.
• We do see the overall Gas being reduces quite a lot for the 40K blocks after vs before
  • 20M $USD for 40K block before the merge.
  • 11.9M $USD for 40K block after the merge.

$ETH Price

• ETH price however has seen quite a lot of decrease in value after the merge, it has nothing to with the merge, however it has more to do with the market overall.
• Before the merge it was around 1.6K $USD, whereas it is now at 1.3K $USD.

Conclusion

• All metrics expect the price see a slight uptick in the numbers after the Merge.
• There is nothing out of the ordinary though, except increase in the number of users on Sep 17, 2022.
• NFT Sales and Swaps have seen in increase overall as well.