This week, Bitcoin’s (BTC) price took a tumble as a hotter-than-expected consumer price index (CPI) report showed high inflation remains a persistent challenge despite a wave of interest rate hikes from the United States Federal Reserve. Interestingly, the market’s negative reaction to a high CPI print seemed priced in by investors, and BTC’s and Ether’s (ETH) prices reclaimed all of their intraday losses to close the day in the black. A quick look at Bitcoin’s market structure shows that even with the post-CPI print drop, the price continues to trade in the same price range it has been in for …

One month after the Merge, 51% of ethereum blocks were compliant with OFAC standards, according to blockchain development Labrys' data, as MEV-boost relays takes over market share. On Twitter, users highlighted how the figures represent a milestone towards censorship, as more blocks are under surveillance: We reached another sad milestone in censorship: 51% This means if the censoring validators would now stop attesting to non-censoring blocks they would eventually form the canonical, 100% censoring chain. pic.twitter.com/JrYUjowLpt — Martin Köppelmann (@koeppelmann) October 14, 2022 OFAC stands for Office of Foreign Assets Control, the entity in charge of enforcing the United States …

Ethereum's native token, Ether (ETH), looks ready to undergo a massive rally due to a mix of technical and fundamental factors. From a technical perspective, ETH's price now eyes a 35% rebound by the end of October after holding testing a key support level. This level is a rising trendline that has capped Ether's downside attempts since June 2022, as shown below. In other words, traders have shown interest in buying Ethereum tokens near this level in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the accumulation sentiment has prompted the price to rise toward another significant level — a horizontal trendline resistance near $1,800, …

One of the core development teams behind the Ethereum (ETH) Merge, Prysmatic Labs, has been acquired by Offchain Labs, the developer of Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum. Announced in an Oct. 13 blog post by Offchain Labs, the deal's financial terms were not disclosed, but it was noted Prysmatic Labs chose to join Offchain Labs "for many reasons," but mainly because of the two companies' alignment in their core beliefs. Prysmatic Labs co-founder Raul Jordan said the move will "build a unified team stronger than the sum of its parts." "Merging with Offchain Labs made perfect sense to us as an …

Smart contract blockchains have played a pivotal role in creating wide-ranging functionality after the advent of Bitcoin in 2009. Ethereum led the way in this regard, but innovative technology stacks like Polkadot have brought a new paradigm to the sector. It’s been just less than a year since Polkadot’s Relay Chain went live in December 2021, and the platform’s ecosystem continues to grow as interest in Web3 increases across the world. Polkadot shares an intrinsic link to Ethereum given that its creator Gavin Wood played a role as a co-founder of the preeminent smart contract platform some seven years ago. …

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has been pointing out the flaws affecting the Ethereum protocol following its latest upgrade. A major issue, according to Hoskinson, is the locking mechanism that prevents investors from withdrawing their staked Ether (ETH) from the Beacon Chain until the completion of the next upgrade. “Ethereum is the Hotel California of cryptocurrencies. You can check in but you can't check out,” said Hoskinson in a recent Cointelegraph Interview. According to Hoskison, this mechanism heavily impacts ETH's liquidity and could eventually spark a liquidity crisis. “You'll have less and less Ether trading in the marketplace," he explained. "And …

Ethereum’s long-awaited transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism kicked off on Sept. 15, thus finally putting its long-standing transaction woes in the rearview mirror. To this point, the network is now capable of processing anywhere between 20,000–100,000 transactions per second (tps) as opposed to its previous rate of just 30 tps. Furthermore, the Merge also saw the Ethereum network become up to 99.9% more energy efficient as compared to its previous iteration, thus allaying fears of its excessive energy consumption, a criticism that still lingers quite heavily in relation to Bitcoin (BTC). Amid these developments, however, a question that …

Traders’ sentiment about Ether (ETH) has noticeably improved as the price rallied 7.5% from Oct. 2 to Oct. 6, but the price recapturing the $1,350 level was not compelling enough to trigger any bullish activity from derivatives traders. Ether price is still 32% below the $2,000 level last seen on Aug. 14 and the network’s average transaction fee stood near $2 after the Merge. The most significant upgrade on the Ethereum chain happened on Sept. 15, switching from energy-intensive mining technology to a set of validators required to deposit 32 ETH in staking. Although necessary to implement future sharding or …

Ethereum blockchain shifted from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism on Sept. 15, 2022. Along with this move, ETHPoW, a distinct PoW blockchain (basically the old pre-Merge Ethereum) forked from Ethereum's Merge, became live. This forked version of Ethereum aims to maintain the proof-of-work mining process for ETH miners. Any miner is permitted to add a block to the PoW network with the clear stipulation that the first valid block published is the correct one. In reality, more than one legitimate block is occasionally discovered by the network due to the latency of data propagation, creating numerous …

After the Ethereum network’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), staking Ether (ETH) now plays a central role in validating blocks and securing the network. However, some community members believe that the staking process is too difficult, especially for regular people. In the Ethereum subreddit, a member of the community raised the topic of ETH staking and its difficulties. According to the user, it took them an entire weekend just to get things up and running. The user said that this may be something that those with "unforgiving" schedules can't accommodate. They wrote: “The Ethereum community likes to sugarcoat usability but it’s …

The Merge upgrade for Ethereum (ETH), which primarily sought to transition the blockchain into a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, has been revealed to have a positive impact on the creation of new Ethereum blocks. The Merge was considered one of the most significant upgrades for Ethereum. As a result of the hype, numerous misconceptions around cheaper gas fees and faster transactions plagued the crypto ecosystem, which was debunked by Cointelegraph. However, some of the evident improvements experienced by the blockchain post-Merge include a steep increase in daily block creation and a substantial decrease in average block time. On Sept. 15, …

As the dust settled over the Ethereum network’s highly-anticipated transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), Eli Ben-Sasson, the co-founder of Starkware, gave his thoughts on its execution and potential for the future. Speaking to Cointelegraph’s Gareth Jenkinson at the Token2049 event, Ben-Sasson shared his thoughts on the current situation post-Merge and how it affects layer-2 projects like Starkware. In addition to that, the executive also gave his thoughts on the adoption and interest for layer-2 products and the crypto winter. Looking back at the Ethereum Merge’s execution, Ben-Sasson rejoiced that the transition was flawless and said things happened as they should. The …