The Ethereum Bellatrix hard fork – the last step ahead of the Merge implementation – has gone live at epoch 144,896, bringing the network one step closer to the eagerly anticipated upgrade. Several well-known Ethereum community members took to Twitter to welcome the upgrade as it launched. After that, the cryptocurrency market and its participants are getting ready to rise excluding XRP.
XRP Desperately Trying to Break Through
While some coins that will benefit from the transition are rallying, others are desperately trying to reclaim what they lost previously. The Merge rally already happened on the market back when the update’s date was released publicly. Numerous assets, including XRP, suddenly gained more than 20% of their value. Due to the speculative nature of the rally, XRP could not gain a foothold above the local resistance level and tumbled down shortly after, now trading at $0.3. XRP dropped below the important trendline, which acted as a short-term support level previously.
XRP/USSD 4-hour chart | Source: TradingView
At press time, XRP is desperately trying to get back into the trend as it will most likely miss the short-term rally caused by the Merge update if it fails to crawl back above $0.36. In addition to the market price, we are seeing a swift increase in the hashrate of the network. The volatile move on the market correlates with the Ethereum Bellatrix update.
Originally, Ethereum Classic was created as a reaction to events that happened with Ethereum back in 2016, when the network suffered a major hack. With every update, both chains moved away from each other, becoming independent projects. The Merge update will move two networks even further from each other. Of all the alternatives, Ethereum Classic will most likely become the “main PoW network” as no other candidate is showing a such rapid growth in value or hashrate. Meanwhile, some industry experts believe a newly forked ETH PoW will beat ETC in terms of hashrate and will most likely be the main way to mine Ethereum.
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