Merge vs Macro
The Good
In what was undoubtedly one of the greatest instances of long-term collaboration and a celebration of human ingenuity, the Ethereum network finally converted from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake in the early morning hours on Thursday. Contrary to most of the Testnet Merges, there were essentially no hiccups, as the execution layer seamlessly merged with the Beacon Chain and miners powered down their GPUs for the final time (or migrated to another GPU-mined network).
This was an endeavor nearly seven years in the making, with countless iterations, roadblocks, and route changes along the way. As mentioned in our previous notes, regardless of price action through the rest of this year, those with an interest in crypto and who are long innovation should take a few moments to appreciate the work done by the core developers of the Ethereum network. It was a hallmark achievement for open-source development.
As anticipated, the daily issuance of ETH dropped precipitously as the inflation rate for the new PoS network is hovering just north of 1%, as compared to the 4% annualized inflation rate as of just a few days ago.
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