Once the merge happens, no more tokens will get paid out to miners.
As fees get burnt, Ethereum’s native asset, $ETH, will effectively receive value accrual for the first time in its inflationary history.
It could cause a massive run-up in price.
1. $ETH
I think the most obvious, conventional, easy play is just to hold $ETH.
It's simple, it automatically accrues value post-merge thanks to deflationary tokenomics, it can be held completely trustlessly.
With $BTC fading, it is the core, fundamental, crypto bluechip.
It's best to hold it on your own private wallet, but you can also hold it on a centralized exchange or brokerage.
However, just holding it doesn't generate yields.
To earn interest on your ETH, you'll need to stake it:
2. Staked ETH
If you want to maximize your exposure, you should stake your ETH and earn yield on it.
To become a validator for the Beacon Chain, you must deposit a minimum of 32 ETH (worth around $51k) on Launchpad. This ETH can't be sold until well after the merge.
For this reason, most people prefer liquid staking alternatives:
1. Deposit ETH 2. The protocol stakes the ETH to a validator for you 3. You receive a liquid (sellable) wrapper representing a right to that staked ETH 4. The staked ETH accrues interest
If you're really trying to leverage up on your money without leverage trading and risking liquidations, options are one way to do that (although if you've never traded options, stay away).
Two rules I follow to not lose at options in crypto:
1. Don't buy deep out-of-the-money options (even though they're cheap) 2. Don't buy options with short expiry.
Instead: 1. Buy calls in-the-money 2. Buy calls with a long expiry (you have time to break even)
The reason I like options for this trade is because ETH has option liquidity available for retail-which is really only the case for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Here's the options chain for Ethereum calls on Deribit, I like the $1300 calls.
Finally, we have some altcoins specifically related to the success of the merge and it's bullishness for Ethereum.
Think of them as leverage bets on the Ethereum ecosystem.
LIDO:
Lido is a liquid staking service for multiple layer ones that has become more and more dominant throughout its life cycle.
The bull case for Lido is simple: category winners tend to keep winning.
And although there are alternatives on the market, LIDO looks undervalued
Stakewise and Rocket Pool:
$SWISE and $RPL are also liquid staking services, and at lower market caps they've got the potential to take off.
But as they're an order of magnitude smaller than LIDO, think of these as outside bets.
They'll either win big or underperform.
Manifold Finance:
Manifold Finance is a relatively new project founded by Sam Bacha, a former Sushiswap dev that's switched his attention to MEV (Miner Extractable Value.)
As the nature of MEV shifts post-merge, look for $FOLD to take advantage.
I think it's probably silly for 99% of crypto investors to be sidelined right now.
Crazy pumps happen every day on low-liq coins with decent fundamentals, and there's not enough liquidity for whales to dump on you.
'but muh macro'
If you buy a coin with a $10m mkt cap, $60m FDV and $500k in liq, it's got less market beta just by the fact that people don't want to dump.
It's a narrow meta, but it's working.
Denominate in ETH and take profits when the pump fades. You probably can't predict macro and at least you're stacking more ETH in the meantime, will ETH hit ATH again?
Ethereum's merge is coming, and with it comes the risk of a blockchain fork that could split the network in two.
So, what are the odds of a viable Ethereum fork? How could it happen? And what does it mean for crypto investors?
Read on:
(TL;DR, probably not, but it's possible)
First, we've got to get caught up on the merge.
The merge is Ethereum's transition from it's current consensus algorithm (Proof-of-Work/PoW) to a new, more scalable system called proof-of-stake/PoS.
It has a ton of benefits:
The merge, among other things:
• Reduces energy consumption by 99.5%
• Opens the door for the Ethereum scaling roadmap
• Creates a deflationary token supply, good for the token
• Makes it easier/cheaper for users to set up a network validator
A flurry of ecosystems have recently announced zero-knowledge, EVM-comptabile rollups.
I know, it's a mouthful.
So what do ZK-rollups mean for Ethereum? What does they mean for you as a user? And how could this tech transform crypto?
Today, we take a look:
Let's get some questions out of the way first.
1. What is a ZK-rollup?
Since Ethereum (a so-called Layer 1 network) is expensive and slow, many have spent the last few years trying to build 'rollups' on top of the network to make it cheaper & quicker.
Three Arrows Capital was one of the biggest crypto hedge funds, at one point managing over $10 billion in capital—
Until the founders dropped off the map.
A 1000-page legal document came out today, bringing clarity to the case.
I went through it. This is what I found:
To get you up to speed:
After making a series of large directional trades (GBTC, LUNA, stETH) and borrowing from 20+ large institutions, Three Arrows Capital (3ac) went bust.
Then the founders ran, and the loan defaults have lead to mass contagion in crypto.
As founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies are nowhere to be seen, legal proceedings move forwards.
Today, a court document was leaked, one which asks the Singapore Government (where 3AC is based) to recognize liquidation proceedings and cooperate with liquidators.