Vitalik Buterin: ETH 2.0 Will be Here Sooner than Expected; Bulls Send Ethereum Above $500

While Bitcoin has been leading the crypto market rally and still continues to remain strong, today, ETH is the one that is in the spotlight.

The second-largest cryptocurrency broke above $500, which puts 84% of the addresses holding ETH in profits. These gains have an open interest on ETH perpetual swap, reaching a yearly high of $1.42 billion.

The crypto community is excited about ETH trending up with Kain Warwick, the creator of popular DeFi project Synthetix, sharing on Twitter,

“If you’ve been patiently grinding away building while accumulating ETH for the last three years, there is absolutely no shame in feeling some vindication euphoria at $500 right now.

Ignoring price action is good advice day to day, but every once in a while it’s worth noting.”

Now that Bitcoin is taking a breather, altcoins have taken to enjoy the greens, including MEME (370%), YFL (36.5%), bzrx (32%), CREAM (28%), SUSHI (20%), CRV (15%), DOT (13%), and SNX (10%).

Currently, there are 48.81 million addresses with a balance in ETH compared to 32.84 million in BTC.

Interestingly, while up 287% YTD, ETH is still 67% away from its all-time high of $1,570.

Aslong as we dont nuke below September high, im expecting a push towards 750 $ETHUSD (current price 504)

— TraderSZ (@trader1sz) November 20, 2020

What has also been supportive for Ethereum is that instead of flooding the market with Eth during the recent liquidity exodus from Uniswap, the overall liquidity levels have since stabilized, and yield farmers have turned to Sushiswap.

ETH 2.0

Amidst the greenery, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that he expects noticeable network improvements sooner rather than later.

During the AMA session on Reddit hosted by the Ethereum Foundation’s ETH 2.0 research team, Buterin shared that the faster the merge happens, the faster the proof of stake (PoS) transition will happen means, the faster we get the 100k TPS.

“Eth2 did launch in 2020; what happens from here is entirely up to the community,” agreed Buterin with others.

Over the last few months, there has been a lot of moving things around in the roadmap, explaining which Buterin said for the simplified merge,

“eth1 transactions will live directly on the beacon chain instead of being in a shard.”

The newest and most underrated change, according to him, is that the light client support, data sharding, and the merge, all are independent of each other — this “parallelization of phases further opens the door to the merge being implemented even sooner than expected; there's even a chance it could happen before sharding.”

Recently, Ethereum's mining hashrate reached a new all-time high after it crossed 256 terahash per second (TH/S) in terms of a seven-day moving average (7DMA).

This has been the foundation’s fifth AMA on ETH 2.0 in which Buterin further commented on the ETH supply, saying that its issuance schedule is -4.7M per year for the next -1-2 years up until the merge, and then -0-2M per year minus burned fees.

Ethereum (ETH) Live Price