HashKey Capital: Ethereum Upgrade - What’s Changing and Why does it matter?

The Ethereum upgrades, formerly known as Serenity aka Ethereum 2.0, will enable an explosion of possibilities in the Ethereum blockchain, make it more secure, more decentralized, and energy-efficient and will allow millions of people (and given enough time, perhaps billions) to interact with DeFi protocols, NFTs and the Web3 ecosystem.

The long-awaited Ethereum upgrades – The Beacon chain (already live), The Merge and Shard Chains– promise to revolutionize the Web 3 world. These important upgrades have been planned for many years. The Ethereum core developers have spent thousands of hours developing and testing these network improvements that will move Ethereum from PoW to PoS and implement shard chains to increase the throughput from approx. 15 transactions per second to up to 100k TPS. These are radical changes for the network. How will they affect Ethereum, the users, validators, and Ether’s price?

The Merge: Taking Ethereum to the Next Level

The Ethereum developers have been planning since the Ethereum inception a few upgrades that would allow the blockchain to be more decentralized, (even) more secure, and more scalable. They also strive to put a cherry on the top of the cake: making Ethereum more energy efficient.

Achieving these 4 things with the upcoming upgrades would be already a massive achievement that will open the Valhalla gates of adoption and drive more usage for Ether. However, there is more good news that may drive the price up. The move to Proof of Stake will require validators to stake Ether, locking it away from the secondary market. Staking Ether will provide rewards that will likely incentivize a good percentage of the total Ether supply to be staked. By securing the network with validator nodes, stakers will also earn rewards that can go up to 10%. 

The full report “Ethereum Upgrade What’s Changing and Why Does It Matter” is available to download here.

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