The Merge. Who Would Win and Who Would Lose?

The Merge will happen very soon. We’ve been waiting for years, and now we’re almost at the finish line. But not everyone is happy that this will happen soon. Who will win and who will lose? Let’s talk about it.

We recently wrote that The Merge date has been confirmed. The process is irreversible, and will happen on September 15th if everything goes according to plan, of course (barring previous problems).

💡 Don’t know what The Merge is? Click here.

In this article we will talk about what is happening in the crypto community against the background of the upcoming The Merge. Opinions differ with some that are glad that The Merge will be happening soon, and others that hope for another delay.

What are the opinions? Let’s start with the opinion of crypto venture capitalist Paul Veradittakit. In a recent interview with Forbes, Paul shared his thoughts on The Merge. He believes that The Merge will happen on September 15th, there will be no delays. Paul also thinks that “it’s going to bring a lot of visibility and development on Ethereum.”

“The Ethereum ecosystem is going to thrive and folks are going to be looking at Ethereum, Layer 2s. I also think it could be helpful for DeFi and potentially even push some other use cases like NFTs on Ethereum. So, it’ll probably shift the focus a bit more to Ethereum. The other Layer 1s will have to evaluate how that goes and figure what their differentiators are going to be post merge.”

Many DeFi and NFT projects are preparing for the upcoming transition of Ethereum to PoS. Previously, NFTs were often criticized because of the high energy costs for creating pictures with monkeys. The Merge will reduce the energy consumption of Ethereum by 99.95%, which will please those people who are concerned about the environment. In addition to this, the theory being that it will attract the attention of large firms to Ethereum, which previously did not want to participate in environmentally “dirty” projects.

But of course, nothing is without its problems. Let’s start small. As Lark Davis, a major crypto investor, reminds us, The Merge will not lower the gas price.

Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, in turn, expressed his concerns that The Merge could lead to centralization of Ethereum.

The biggest problem of The Merge is mining. All those who have been mining ETH are extremely disappointed that this opportunity will literally be taken away from them. Regularly, on the eve of The Merge, there has been discussion on the Ethereum hard fork, which may arise after The Merge. Miners do not want to lose income, and there are quite a lot of ETH miners. Therefore, the chances of a hard fork appearing are high.

Moreover, ETHPoW has already appeared. It works on the Ethereum blockchain and appeared on exchanges in early August and cost $140.93 at its peak, but now its value is in the range of $45-$50.

There is not enough information on the project’s website, but the message of the creators is expressed very clearly.

“Ethereum Foundation is shifting to a PoS fork while we decided to stay with the PoW Ethereum.”

Miners are also reminded about Ethereum Classic, which runs on PoW.

Large exchanges also take into account the chances of the appearance of various Ethereum hard forks. DigiFinex exchange has announced that it will support a potential Ethereum hard fork.

One of the main market players — Binance — has also prepared an announcement about The Merge, which says that hard fork will also be supported, if it appears.

“The chain splits into two competing chains and a new token is created. The “ETH” ticker will be used for the Ethereum PoS chain. We will then credit to users’ Binance accounts the forked token from the minority chain at a ratio of 1:1, based on the snapshot of ETH balances before the Paris execution layer upgrade (approximately at ETH mainnet block height of 15,540,293, or 2022–09–15 00:30 (UTC)). Withdrawals for the forked token will be supported.”

There are a lot of opinions, some people will be happy, some will be disappointed, and some will cast doubts. But one thing is distinctly clear — something great is waiting for us. We continue to observe.