ANN/THE STRAITS TIMES – Ether led digital assets lower after a groundbreaking software upgrade of the token’s underlying network turned into what some market observers labelled a “sell the news” event.
The second-largest token dropped as much as 3.8 per cent on Friday and was trading around USD1,475 as at 12.40pm in Singapore, following a more-than-six-per-cent slide on Thursday. Ether is paring a rally since mid-June, sparked in part by optimism about the Ethereum update – called the Merge – to slash the network’s energy use.
“Now the excitement around the Merge is done, and we don’t have a catalyst for Ethereum in the short term,” said head of research at crypto exchange and prime broker BeQuant Martha Reyes.
“It would be natural to expect a bit of rotation back (into Bitcoin),” she added.
Bitcoin dropped as much as 1.4 per cent earlier and was trading below USD20,000. Smaller coins such as Avalanche, Polygon and Solana also wavered.
Ethereum’s revamp makes it vastly more energy-efficient and paves the way for it to scale up and become quicker, the network’s developers have said. The move to a so-called proof-of-stake approach from proof-of-work was years in the making and seems to have gone smoothly, though hiccups remain possible.
