The price of Ethereum surpasses $2,000 as the network nears a fork

Ethereum supporters are showing their enthusiasm for the September Merge by purchasing ETH.

According to statistics compiled by CoinMarketCap, Ethereum (ETH) extended its bull run and recovered the $2,000 barrier late Friday night, a feat it hadn’t accomplished since May.

At the time of writing, the second largest cryptocurrency by market value had risen to $2,014, a rise of 7% in the previous 24 hours and 17% in the past week. In only a month, it almost doubled in size.

According to statistics provided by Coinglass, more than $152 million in Ethereum short bets were closed off during the previous day. Staking on Ethereum 2.0 has also reached a record high of 13.2 million ETH, according to statistics from Beaconscan.

This week the Goerli testnet finished switching over to a proof-of-stake mining method, serving as the last dress rehearsal (after successful testnet mergers on Sepolia and Ropsten) before the mainnet merging, which is currently scheduled on September 15 or 16.

To improve network performance and cut energy usage by as much as 99%, the Ethereum mainnet is transitioning from the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism to the less resource-intensive proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus process.

Some people are sceptical that the post-merge Ethereum would be as ideal as some of the network’s core developers have claimed. Still, the update will likely reduce Ethereum’s sky-high transactional costs.

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