ETH Held On Exchanges Drops As Stakers Prepare For The Merge

ETH held on exchanges drops as the stakers prepare for the Merge event so let’s have a closer look at today’s Ethereum latest news.

EtH held on exchanges reached a four-year low alongside the steady inflows in the network’s staking contract before the Merge. Yesterday, Ethereum held on exchange hit a four-year low after a record staking figure on ETH 2.0. The centralized exchanges that were tracked by Glassnode, show that 19.09 million ETH is held which is under 20 million from 2018. ETH held on exchanges also crashed by 10% over the past five days.

The data points also firmed up with higher outflows from exchanges recently. Exchange outflows hit a 13-month high which indicates less interest among investors to trade and hold the asset on the centralized exchanges. The data from Chainalysis reported similar findings:

“The change in ETH held on exchanges experienced the largest one-day decrease in 202 days, decreasing by 432.84k ETH to 249.58k ETH.”

The sharp drop in ETH held across exchanges is due to a result of the growing amount of ETH staked on the network as it prepares for the biggest upgrade just yet. Unlike the current ETH network, ETH 2.0 is a PoS network where validators stake their ETH to verify the network’s integrity. Ethereum staked on the Beacon Chain as a PoS version of Ethereum launched in 2020, has been increasing over the past few days. The merge is expected to happen on September 19 which will see the current mainnet merge with the PoS version and the total amount staked sits at 13.14 million with more than 410,000 different validators.

Amid the bullish exchange flows, Ethereum jumped 8.6% and traded near $1638 with a market cap of $199 billion, rallying 34%  over the past week.

As earlier reported, Buterin asserted that the ETH Developers are working on five long-term stages that aim to improve the network’s overall capabilities and the first on the agenda was the Merge testing which is 90% complete and has to be tested on Ropsten. During the ongoing annual Ethereum conference and Buterin outlined the improvements that the development team is working on for both the long-term and the short-term. With the protocol’s long-anticiapted switch from PoW to PoS coming later this year, the ethereum founder noted that most of the testing has been done. He said that the Merge is left to be tested on Ropsen which can happen quite soon.