Expert forecasts a threefold rise in Ethereum price after The Merge

After activation of The Merge update on the Ethereum mainnet, the price of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap could rise in the long term to $5,000, according to Roman Nekrasov, co-founder of ENCRY Foundation, in an interview with ForkLog.

In his words, in the near term the ETH price could experience significant volatility. Nekrasov recommended holders to hold the cryptocurrency over the next three months.

“In the 3- to 6-month horizon, I expect Ethereum to rise. With favorable conditions, the price could reach $5,000,” the expert added.

At the time of writing, the second-largest cryptocurrency is trading around $1,480, according to CoinGecko.

The co-founder of ENCRY Foundation doubted the intrinsic value the upcoming PoW fork of Ethereum (ETHW). He advised paying attention to the coin Ethereum Classic, which is ‘backed by a serious development team’.

“Miners began redirecting GPUs to mining ETC since mid-July, when the timing of The Merge activation became known. In the run-up to the update, Ethereum Classic’s price rose substantially, and, in my view, it will rise further,” he said.

Although lowering transaction fees to $0.05 has been defined by Vitalik Buterin as the target, one should not expect a sharp drop, according to Roman Nekrasov.

He expects that more likely the reduction in transaction costs will be driven by the implementation of sharding, which would raise Ethereum’s throughput to 100,000 transactions per second.

“The Merge update is nonetheless aimed at addressing the problem of increasing the blockchain’s energy efficiency, rather than scalability, though it also lays the groundwork for this,” the expert explained.

The main challenge for developers after the network shifts to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus will be Ethereum’s resilience to 51% attacks and censorship.

“Some note that 30% of staked Ether is under the control of the popular service Lido. Others fear that the switch to PoS will lead to transactions being censored at the authorities’ request, since miners were more anonymous than stakers. But both are only fears,” Nekrasov added.

On September 15 at 9:42 a.m. Kyiv time, Ethereum developers activated The Merge on the mainnet. The blockchain was successfully moved to PoS.

Read more about the upgrade in ForkLog’s special feature.

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