Ether obtained a two-month high after developers have set a final dress rehearsal for a key boost up which will happen next month.
According to CoinMetrics data, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency boosts to $1,927 on Thursday, its highest point since early June. The token was last trading at $1,901.69, showing a 4.4% uptick on the day.
On Wednesday, Ethereum has done its final dry run for the "merge," a vital event that is expected to make it faster and more energy-efficient. Goerli, one of Ethereum's test networks, has started a process that is the same as what the main network will do in September.
Testnets will be allowing developers to try new ways and make the necessary tweaks to apply before putting up updates to the main blockchain.
The underlying blockchain of ether will transition from a proof-of-work system to a more efficient model known as proof-of-stake as a result of the signed pact. Crypto miners are used to verifying transactions in proof-of-work consensus mechanisms.
Verification networks, on the other hand, require validators to hold a certain amount of tokens in order to participate, making them noticeably less energy-intensive. The event, which has been postponed numerous times, will now be set for September 19.
Once it is done, the upgrade is expected to speed up transactions on the Ethereum network and make it much more energy-efficient, with supporters waiting it will address concerns about cryptocurrency's environmental impact. But because of that, some investors have a feeling that ether will eventually topple down bitcoin.
In recent years, Bitcoin has fared poorly to other tokens, with its market share dropping at the 40% mark from its peak at nearly 70% at the start of 2020.
“The purpose of why you buy bitcoin, from a mindset perspective, and what you actually want to do with that is fundamentally different than when you use Ethereum,” said BCG Platinion managing director Kaj Burchardi.
He added that the belief that Ethereum eventually beats bitcoin as the crypto king is “pretty much irrelevant” since they don’t directly battle for crypto supremacy.
“Ethereum ... is not a use case. It’s providing possibilities of implementing really good use cases like NFTs [nonfungible tokens] and banking products on a platform. Bitcoin is a use case.”, Burchardi added.
After the success of the merge test, Ether have obtained a wide rally among cryptoassets on Thursday, with the total value of all cryptocurrencies expanding by more than $70 billion in a single day to $1.2 trillion.
Bitcoin was up 6% at $24,507, reaching a nearly two-week high, while Binance's BNB token was up 3% at $330.Thus, investors have been affected badly by cryptocurrencies in general following the disastrous meltdown of the $60 billion stablecoin TerraUSD, which sent ripples through the crypto market and contributed to the downturn of investment firms Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, and Voyager Digital.
Since reaching a peak of more than $3 trillion in November, the whole crypto market has lost at least $2 trillion in value.