While Bitcoin continues to search for its compass, Ethereum is making gains. One reason: The upcoming “London” hard fork.
Ebb is still the order of the day in the crypto ocean. For example, the flagship of digital assets continues its sideways trend today. Overnight, Bitcoin posted a slight plus of 0.14 percent, standing at 34,777 US dollars and is therefore still a long way from the golden beaches of past months. In a weekly comparison, the digital store of value even has to accept slight losses (0.8 percent).
Meanwhile, bullish news is coming from the USA that could further push crypto adoption in the country. Because as reported in the US media, the payment service provider would like to Allied Payment its customers Trading in cryptocurrencies enable. This should be done through a cooperation with the New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) can be made possible. This will allow Allied’s institutional customers to buy, sell and play Bitcoin in the future.
Last week, a partnership with NYDIG caused euphoria in the crypto space when the financial services provider gave 650 US banks the opportunity to offer their customers trading in Bitcoin.
Hard fork “London” brings cuts for Ethereum miners
While Bitcoin is still looking for its course, Ethereum seems to have already found it. The second most valuable cryptocurrency recorded a slight gain of 3 percent overnight. This means that ETH is trading at $ 2,387 at the time of going to press. In a weekly comparison, Ethereum has increased by almost 12 percent.
The upswing of the past week can be explained by the upcoming hard fork of the cryptocurrency. Ethereum has long planned to transform its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. After the updates Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby paved the way to Ethereum 2.0, the next step is now. This is called “London” and is now from Tim Beiko, one of the leading ETH developers, has been scheduled for August 4th. The fork should then be executed between 13:00 and 17:00 UTC. The update was actually supposed to come in mid-July, but has been postponed due to technical difficulties.
With “London” will bring a total of five innovations for the Ethereum network. Among other things the EIP-1559, which should lower the inflation of gas fees and make them generally more predictable. However, the protocol change is very controversial as it aims to burn some of the fees and thereby reduce miners’ income.
EIP3554 should meanwhile increase the difficulty in mining dramatically. The aim is to “freeze” the proof-of-work process in the long term in order to be able to prepare for the change to proof-of-stake.
BNB, Polkadot and Uniswap slightly up
In addition to Ethereum, there is also movement in the altcoin sector. Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP) and Dogecoin (DOGE) are slightly in the red between 0.6 and 1.3 percent. The situation is different with the other top 10 coins. Both the Binance Coin (BNB) and Polkadot (DOT) and Uniswap (UNI) recorded price gains of between 3 and 6 percent overnight.