The Merge Boosted Cryptos On Thursday

Crypto values jumped early on Thursday as Ethereum moved a few steps closer to “The Merge.” This is generally seen as a bullish move for crypto use cases because Ethereum has the largest base of developers and many tokens are on the Ethereum blockchain.

The value of Ethereum was up as much as 7.9% in the last 24 hours as of 1 p.m. ET. Bitcoin had jumped 6.2%, and Dogecoin was up 8.2% at its peak.

The last test before the main blockchain will make such a move. Goerli is an active test blockchain where developers can see if new systems work as planned before moving to the main blockchain. Ethereum has gone through a number of tests ahead of the transition to proof of stake operations to find potential bugs and this is the last one expected before the final merge.

The official merge has been scheduled for mid-September and this is intended to improve the blockchain in a number of ways. Validation of blocks, or transactions, will be done through staking rather than energy-intensive computations. This will lower the energy consumption of Ethereum by over 99%. It will not, notably, make transactions less costly.

The Merge is the first in a series of planned upgrades that could allow Ethereum to complete 100,000 transactions per second. These upgrades could take a long time, but co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out the development plans already.

Today’s move is really nothing more than speculation that The Merge will lead to increased activity on Ethereum and in the crypto ecosystem more broadly. But this may not have a fundamental impact on the blockchain at all.