This text is taken from the Courrier de l’économie of September 19, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
This merge, or this merger – about which Marcel-Nicolas Murillo wonders – is in a way a cascade of good news for both cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors, young and old. We can even go so far as to say that the general public should be happy about it, given that at the base, the main interest of this event is that it promises to reduce to almost nothing the IT work necessary to validate transactions. made using Ethereum and, therefore, to reduce the energy consumption in an equivalent way.
Thus, specialists predict that what could be called Ethereum 2.0 will consume 99% less energy to operate and that, despite everything, users and owners of this token will not see any difference in the way they operate. use it.
Postponed repeatedly for months for different reasons, this merger needed the technological stars to align to occur, something that happened Thursday morning. This is an upgrade to the way we certify transactions made on Ethereum. In the previous method, the proof-of-work (proof by effort), all miners support the platform by producing new tokens in competition with each other. The new method, called proof-of-stake (proof-by-commitment), assigns only a small number of randomly selected miners the task of producing these tokens.
The success of the operation made everyone a bit happy and, although the value of Ethereum fell a bit in the following hours, analysts expect the platform to gain popularity in the coming months. . The total market for Ether, its base token, is worth some US$195 billion, or around 20% of the overall cryptocurrency market. This proportion could increase to 30% by the end of 2023 according to experts. By way of comparison, bitcoin, the most widely used cryptocurrency, represents around 40% of this market.
Naturally, we will have to see how the desire to regulate crypto-assets by certain financial authorities, such as the American Federal Reserve, will cool these enthusiasms…
But besides the NFT, this authentication tool for digital assets, it is believed that this new momentum could revive other types of similar applications based on the blockchain, which used to be called “smart contracts” in another era. These apps promise to automate certain types of digital transactions, such as pre-authorizing or booking a car or a room on upcoming services that could one day rival the Ubers or Airbnbs of this world.
Is there an election promise from one of the parties that you would like to understand better, whether it is related to your personal finances or public finances? Would you like to better understand a specific or general economic issue? Send us your questions, and our team of journalists will work to answer them.