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Kevin O’Leary of ‘Shark Tank’ espouses deflationary future for Ethereum

Shark Tank star, “Mr. Wonderful,” argues that Ethereum is destined to become “ultrasound money” once its chain merge occurs.

Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and reality television personality, Kevin O’Leary — also known as “Mr. Wonderful” — appears to now be singing Ethereum’s praises as a deflationary asset.

Clearly reading from a script, O’Leary took to Cameo — a website that allows users to purchase personalized video messages from celebrities — to espouse the benefits of Ethereum’s August 5 London upgrades. Most notably, the upgrades saw EIP-1559’s highly awaited burn mechanism introduced into Ethereum’s fee market.

“It introduced a very important change to the monetary policy of Ethereum,” said O’Leary. “Currently the fees that users pay to send transactions go to the miner, but after this improvement, the fees will be burned.”

“When you combine this with EIP-3675, which switches the network to Proof-of-Stake, [...] Ethereum will become deflationary,” he concluded, adding:

“If Bitcoin is sound money because of the $21 million supply ceiling [Ethereum] is ultrasound money because there is no supply floor.”

At the time of writing, it has been five days since Ethereum’s highly anticipated 1559 improvement proposal went live.

According to Ultrasound.money, a website tracking the rate at which Ether is being burned through transaction fees, estimating that roughly 20,500 Ether (roughly $63.75 million) have been burned so far.

Related: Ethereum could pave way for $100,000 Bitcoin, Bloomberg analyst asserts

While a firm date for Ethereum’s forthcoming chain merge — which will complete the network’s transition to Proof-of-Stake consensus — is yet to be announced, experts are predicting the merge will occur in early 2022.

Last month, the chain merge was formalized as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal for the first time. Now dubbed EIP-3765, the upgrade was formalized through the creation of a pull request on GitHub.

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‘Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3675’ for the Eth2 merge launches on Github

The coming Eth2 Proof-of-Stake chain merge now has an Ethereum Improvement Proposal.

A formal Ethereum Improvement Proposal has been created for the network’s forthcoming chain merge, bringing Ethereum one step closer to realizing its highly anticipated Proof-of-Stake (PoS) transition.

On July 22, ConsenSys researcher Mikhail Kalinin created a pull-request for EIP-3675 on Github, formalizing the chain merge as an improvement proposal for the first time. The EIP has also been slated for discussion during the July 23 Ethereum Core Devs Meeting by developer Tim Beiko.

The proposal would merge the Ethereum and Eth2 chains, transitioning the network’s consensus mechanism away from Proof-of-Work and empowering stakers to validate transactions.

The EIP notes that no “safety nor liveness failures were detected” since the launch of Eth2’s beacon chain in December 2020, adding:

“The long period of running without failures demonstrates the sustainability of the beacon chain system and witnesses its readiness to start driving and become a security provider for the Ethereum Mainnet.”

Despite the EIP, many leading figures in the Ethereum community, including lead developer Vitalik Buterin, believe it is very unlikely the chain merge will occur during 2021.

The EIP comes amid bidding for the EIP-1559 Supporter NFT series which was launched via Mirror on July 21. The nonfungible tokens demonstrate support for the introduction of a burn mechanism to Ethereum’s fee market as part of the network’s coming London upgrades. All proceeds will be shared among 1559's contributors, and the tokens were designed by artist "Kitteh."

Since the launch of the beacon chain in December, Eth2 has emerged as the second-largest PoS network by staked capitalization in USD terms, with $12.7 billion worth of Ether locked in staking despite less than 6% of its circulating supply having been deposited.

According to Staking Rewards, Cardano has the largest staked capitalization with $24.2 billion and 62% of supply locked. Solana ranks third with $10.2 billion from 74%, followed by Polkadot with $9 billion from 63%.

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