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Does the merge increase price of $ETH ?

• Unfortunately no, as well, some people expected the price of ETH to increase as it now becomes a deflationary token, however that was priced in and we actually see the price of ETH decreasing slightly.
• In the long term, Ethereum 2.0 will become a more deflationary-focused crypto, with the Ethereum block reward falling. Prior to the Merge, around 13,000 Ether were issued per day. After the Merge, that figure falls to around 1,600 Ether per day.[1]

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Does the merge reduce the gas price of transactions ?

• That is a no. Ethereum's notorious gas fees are unlikely to fall straight after the Merge completes. It won't be until Ethereum 2.0 implements blockchain sharding that users see a reduction in on-chain gas fees. [1]
• The data tells the same story with minimal change in Gas used per transaction both cumulative and per block metrics.
• We do see the overall Gas being used more for the 8000 blocks after vs before
  • 3.3M $USD for 8000 block before the merge.
  • 3.5M $USD for 8000 block after the merge.
• The block level metrics tell the same story the Gas actually increased after the merge instead of decreasing, with the highest Gas fee per block being 46 $ETH after the merge vs 5 $ETH before the merge.

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.

Overview

There are certain questions about the merge which we try to answer using on-chain analytics.

We try to answer the following questions in this analysis:

• Does the merge reduce the gas price of transactions ?
• Does the merge increase price of $ETH ?
• Does the merge means higher activity of users ?
• Does the merge means higher activity of transactions ?
• Does the merge make Ethereum Faster ?

Methodology

• To get a comparative analysis we look at 8000 blocks both before and after the merge block 15537351
• We look at the data from ethereum.core.fact_transactions table and compute various metrics to answer the questions above.
• Such as transactions frequency, block metrics like number of transactions per block, time difference between blocks, etc.

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

Conclusion

• Even though we did not expect the Ethereum Blockchain to get faster or reduce transactions Gas costs.
• However, the block level metrics tell that the Ethereum Blockchain is slightly faster with more number of transactions per block and less time difference between blocks.
• However, the Gas metrics do see an increase Gas Used per transaction on both the overall and the block level.

About me:

• Author: Hojjat
• Discord: hojjat7878#8809
• Twitter: @hojjat8d
• Email: hojjat78delshad@gmail.com

THANK YOU FOR READING!

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Does the merge means higher activity of users ?

• The number of users using the blockchain is almost identical, with the cumulative numbers actually slightly decreased.
• 744K users for 8000 blocks before the merge.
• 714K users for 8000 blocks after the merge.

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Does the merge means higher activity of transactions ?

• The number of transactions actually see a slight increase, with the cumulative numbers actually slightly increased as well.
• 1.48M transactions for 8000 blocks before the merge.
• 1.51M transactions for 8000 blocks after the merge.

Does the merge make Ethereum Faster ?

Transactions per Block

• Minimum, Average and Medium number of quite comparable before and after the merge.
• The Maximum number is quite a bit high after the merge, 1.4K vs .8K

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.
• Seems like the merge made Ethereum blockchain slightly faster.