- ETH charged to $2,400, representing a 24-hour increase of nearly 8%.
- The market possibly reacted to the co-founder’s plans of simplifying Ethereum’s PoS mechanism.
Why should Bitcoin [BTC] have all the fun?
After remaining subdued while its senior partner was soaking in festivities, Ethereum [ETH] led the crypto market surge in the last 24 hours.
The second-largest cryptocurrency charged to $2,400, representing a 24-hour increase of nearly 8% at press time, according to CoinMarketCap.
Ethereum wakes up after dormancy
The rally got traders interested as daily volume surged past $16 billion, according to AMBCrypto’s analysis of Santiment’s data.
Source: Santiment
The pump also caught the eye of whale investors. The number of transactions worth at least a million jumped by 52% from the previous day.
The market possibly reacted to co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s plans to simplify the network’s proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.
Vitalik’s proposals ignite confidence
In a blog post dated the 27th of December, the crypto tzar stressed the need to weed out a systemic complexity arising due to the mechanism’s design of supporting n number of validators.
The first solution proposed by him was to do away with solo staking and fix decentralized stake pools as the only way for users to participate in the network.
However, the minimum staking requirement would be raised to 4096 ETH and the number of validators capped at 4096.
The second was a two-tiered approach. In this case, a heavy layer with 4096 ETH requirement and a light layer with small-scale stakers for providing an extra layer of security.
Last was the rotating participation method wherein for each slot a set number of validators, around 4096, would be chosen. While this strategy had advantages over the other two, it carried the danger of increased complexity.
It remains to be seen how the community will respond to these proposals. However, ideas to improve the network’s performance from the horse’s mouth generated an optimistic view of ETH.
Read Ethereum’s [ETH] Price Prediction 2023-24
ETH gets volatile
The rally caused a dramatic spike in ETH’s Implied Volatility (IV), according to options data tracking website Greeks.Live. Major IVs like the 1-month, 3-month, and 6-months rose to their yearly peaks as shown below.
Source: Greeks.Live
For the uninitiated, Implied Volatility is the market’s forecast of a likely movement in an asset’s price. This is different from Realized Volatility or Historical Volatility, which are based on past price movements.
