By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 24th, 2024
According to CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong, ETH holders need to move assets on exchanges that support the ETH PoW tokens.
In an update to the much-anticipated upgrade in the blockchain history, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has confirmed on his Twitter handle that the Merge is still expected to happen on September 13-15. However, the Bellatrix hard fork would occur today. This is said to be very important to the whole process as it prepares the chain for the upgrade. The crypto community is also expecting a possible Ethereum Proof of Work alongside the new Proof of Stake Chain. However, the success of this cannot be guaranteed.
It is worth mentioning that the old Ethereum Proof of Work will continue to exist after the Merge, meaning people continue to trade the old coin. Also, all the other coins of traders of ETH would be hooked onto the new consensus mechanism after the Merge. The majority of the Ethereum community members are expecting a bull run after the upgrade as evident in the spike in activities on the network.
It is important to note that 21 million unique Ethereum wallet addresses have been added to the network in 2022 alone. This means 62,000 wallets are added each day. This put the number of unique ETH wallet addresses at above $204.6 million. It is expected that an all-time high of 205 million unique wallet addresses would be reached within a week.
How to Take Advantage of The Merge
According to CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong, ETH holders need to move assets on exchanges that support the ETH PoW tokens. Preferably, they should consider hardware wallets to have full custody of the tokens. He also stated that users would not get any ETH PoW tokens on ETH held on layer 2 scaling solutions like Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc, so it is advisable to bridge all tokens back to the ETH mainnet.
In addition, Ong mentioned that all WETH should be unwrapped to ETH. As there could be decentralized exchanges on the new ETH PoW tokens, it is still better to unwrap them before the merge as it may be difficult in an unstable ecosystem. He finally suggested that users borrow as many ETH as possible from various lending platforms like AAVE to get more of the PoW tokens.
It is important to note that many crypto exchanges including Coinbase, Poloniex, Kraken, OKX, Binance, and BitMEX remain neutral on the ETH PoW tokens. Users are, therefore, advised to cross-check their latest updates before moving their assets to such platforms.