Ether has promised to do better. It has promised to go to the next level, edging out crypto rivals and even outshining the godfather, bitcoin. But the clock’s ticking.
The anticipation had supported ether this year, even as inflation and monetary tightening shackled bitcoin.
“The timeline for seeing this launch continues to extend,” said Brendan Playford, founder and CEO of decentralized financial data platform Masa Finance.
Ether fell 8% from $3,215 to $2,947 on April 11, the day Ethereum lead developer Tim Beiko said on Twitter that the June rollout had been pushed back as tests continued. It is down 13% this month, at $2,844.
“It won’t be June, but likely in the few months after,” Beiko wrote in his tweet. “No firm date yet, but we’re definitely in the final chapter.”
The timing of the merge – Ethereum’s EH1 chain will meld with a new chain to create ETH2 – remains unclear, although many crypto watchers expect it to happen some time this year. Beiko didn’t reply to a request for comment via Twitter and LinkedIn.
Ether’s market capitalization of $363 billion is less than half bitcoin’s , and together the two make up 60% of the crypto market.
The alternate proof-of-stake (POS) method uses much less power because, rather than have millions of computers race to process puzzles, it allows nodes that stake the most coins to validate transactions.
It only processes 30 transactions per second as a proof-of-work blockchain, but expects to process as many as 100,000 transactions per second once it moves to POS.