• ETH has dropped to $1,544, an 11% drop in the previous 24 hours.
• a 10% down in the last 7 days.
• ETH is reacting to macroeconomic factors as well as a probable delay in its transition.

The price of Ethereum (ETH) went below $1,700 as a result of increased selling forces in the crypto market. However, it appears like ETH is reacting to macroeconomic factors as well as a probable delay in its transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain this time.

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According to CoinMarketCap, ETH has dropped to $1,544, an 11% drop in the previous 24 hours and a 10% down in the last seven days. ETH had the lowest seven-day performance of the top ten cryptocurrencies, followed by Polkadot (DOT), Solana (SOL), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Ripple (XRP).

The Ethereum network’s merge update went live three days ago on its oldest testnet, Ropsten. The ETH community applauded the achievement, predicting a mainnet launch in August or September of this year. The Merge, on the other hand, ran into some difficulties. However, Tim Beiko, an ETH core engineer, said that they had been addressed and fixed.

The Difficulty Bomb, a mechanism for gradually increasing mining difficulty, is also one of the mechanisms for moving to a PoS consensus. The bomb is intended to persuade miners to quit proof-of-work systems (PoW).

The ETH core developers agreed that the difficulty bomb should be delayed for two to four months to allow for the migration to a PoS consensus. Ben Edgington, principal product manager for Teku, a ConsenSys-developed Eth2 client, disagreed. He said:

So we will push back the Ethereum difficulty bomb. We say it won’t delay the Merge. I sincerely hope not. Every extra week on PoW generates close to 1 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

The Ethereum merger represents the long-awaited move from Ethereum’s existing proof-of-work method to a proof-of-stake consensus process. The PoS technique will allow the ETH network to expand and process transactions more quickly. The ETH network can now only execute 15 to 45 transactions per second.

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