Bitcoin and Ethereum Take The Lead This Week Surging By 9% – Market Update 12th August

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) take the lead this week as they surged close to 9% each, according to data shared by CoinGecko. Other digital currencies among the top 20 with good performance included Solana (SOL) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). What can we expect in the crypto market this week with the Ethereum Merge? 

Bitcoin and Ethereum Lead the Market

Bitcoin and Ethereum have been the leaders among the top 20 cryptocurrencies over the last seven days. According to CoinGecko, one of the largest crypto price aggregators in the crypto industry, Bitcoin and Ethereum grew by close to 9% over the last seven days. 

To be more precise, Bitcoin grew by 8.8% and Ethereum by 9.4%. In the last 24 hours, instead, Bitcoin grew by 0.8% and Ethereum fell by 1.9% ahead of the Ethereum Merge. Meanwhile, Solana (SOL) registered the third-largest price increase among the top 10 after growing by 7.8% during the last seven days. 

The worst performing asset among the top 10 in the last week was Cardano (ADA), which expanded only by 0.6% during this week. Nevertheless, we should also take into consideration that Cardano had been growing for many weeks at a very fast pace. XRP registered gains of 5.9% and surpassed ADA as the 7th largest digital asset. 

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is being traded at $21,825 and Ethereum is close to $1,735. It would be very interesting to see what could happen with the Ethereum Merge in the next few days. 

Ethereum Merge Takes Place on September 13

One of the main topics in the crypto industry is related to the upcoming Ethereum Merge. That means that Ethereum is ready to transition from a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to a Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain network. This represents a great opportunity for Ethereum to offer more reliable services to the crypto community (faster and cheaper transactions).

Google has also created a countdown clock for the Ethereum Merge. According to it, the merge is expected to take place 2 days and 19 hours from the moment of publishing this article. But could the Ethereum Merge have an impact on the price of ETH and ETC? 

Ethereum Classic registered the largest growth over the last 7 days among the top 20 virtual currencies. This shows that despite the fact that Ethereum could continue to move higher, there is a large number of investors that believe that a Proof of Work Ethereum should exist. 

Indeed, we could see different outcomes from the Merge. Ethereum could hard fork and see two networks: a PoS and a PoW blockchain. This could create many problems for the network if that ends up happening. 

However, Ethereum PoS supporters have been pushing for those users that want to work on a PoW environment to move to ETC rather than forking the network to a PoW ETH. This could be one of the reasons why ETC has surged over the last few days.