The recent surge in the Ethereum options open interest comes amid all the positive developments leading to the Ethereum Merge next month.
The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) has witnessed a solid bull run surging nearly 100% all the way to $2,000 over the last 45 days. As per data from Coinglass, the open interest in ETH options has reached closer to $8 billion recently.
The options open interest is a broadly followed technical metric referring to the total active contracts that are open and yet to be settled. Soon as traders close their position, open interest also falls. Traders usually follow the options open interest metric to determine the market direction. As more traders join the market, it indicates a particular trend gathering steam in the market.
Earlier this month, the open interest for ETH options surpassed the Bitcoin options for the first time. The largest crypto options trading platform Deribit also took note of this recently.
Wow, the flippening is real!$BTC OI $4.7B$ETH OI $7.9B
We like The Merge! pic.twitter.com/wU8JwT0WOM
— Deribit (@DeribitExchange) August 16, 2022
There’s a lot of optimism surrounding the upcoming Ethereum Merge event next month. The Ethereum Merge will transition the existing Proof-of-Work Ethereum blockchain to a more sustainable, efficient, and scalable Ethereum 2.0 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain.
Earlier this month, the Ethereum developers conducted a successful implementation of the Merge upgrade on the Goerli testnet. This was probably the final dress rehearsal of the Ethereum testnet before the Merge integration on the mainnet.
ETH Price Rally and New Developments
The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency is once again beating rival Bitcoin by a huge margin. The trend reversal in ETH started in July as it bounced back from the bottom of $1,000. Since then, ETH has registered nearly 100% gains so far. As of press time, ETH is trading 3.4% up at a price of $1,944 with a market cap of $237 billion.
Relating to the Ethereum Merge, there’s been a fresh controversy going over the Ethereum hard fork. Proponents of Proof-of-Work, especially the Ethereum miners are keen to continue with the existing framework. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has objected to this and said that he won’t be supporting the forked chain in any form.
Dubbed ETHW Core, the team of miners is already gearing up for the next development. On Monday, August 15, they announced:
“ETHW Core has just released its initial version. Main features are – 1. Disabled the difficulty bomb 2. EIP1559 changed: base fee to a multi-sig wallet co-managed by miners and the community. 3. Adjusted the starting mining difficulty of ETHW”.
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