Introduction

ETH Merge, the good and the bad. Let’s first look at the good* and then look at the bad.

Agenda

1. The “Good” (Network Stats)
2. The “Bad” (Price Action)

The “Good”

Network stats, how they’ve changed pre-post merge.

The “Bad”

Price action Pre-Post Merge, both in $ and denominated in BTC (WBTC).

Key Points

• Transactions increase on average the next few days post-merge and then normalise back to the 45-55k level.
  • Maybe people are trying to get out or settling their on-chain priorities, either coming back in or getting out.
  • Maybe people are testing how “Deflationary” ETH can be. From what I’ve seen, the rate of inflation has decreased but has NOT become deflationary (personal view from looking at data analysis on Twitter).
• The time between blocks has decreased significantly from the previous average (This makes sense as there’s no need to have that much time between block finality now that there’s much more centralization in a way).
  • If most validator nodes are running on AWS/GCP /Azure latency better be lower, but this is also due to the new consensus architecture and parameters set by the core ETH team.

Key Points:

• They say “Buy the rumour, sell the news”, it seems that this is very much applicable in this case as both Miners and “Max-bidders” (Speculation) probably sold their ETH right after the merge.
  • The following is clearly seen in both the WETH/WBTC valuation and the WETH/USD one.
  • This is not a speculation, as the price action clearly shows a slight recover up then a continuous dump to the next support and then a clear distribution range forming.
  • Could also be because people were buying ETH to speculate on getting free ETHW airdrop on the forked Proof of Work chain and then sold in both places.