China News Today TheBitTimes.com

The first three to five weeks after Ethereum’s upcoming Shapella upgrade will likely see an uptick in selling from unstaked deposits. The Ethereum Foundation has announced April 12 as the date of deployment of the much-anticipated Shanghai and Capella upgrade, together dubbed as Shapella. The upgrades will enable withdrawals from Ethereum 2.0 staking contracts. The staking contract was first launched in December 2020. It only accepted one-way deposits of ETH, which will change after the upgrade. To date, users have deposited over 18 million ETH, worth around $32.5 billion, into the Ethereum staking contract at varying times since December 2020. Analysts vary on the estimates of ETH sell pressure Most users opted for liquid staking derivatives on decentralized or centralized exchanges. Because these stakers are already liquid, there will likely be no new reason to sell after the Shapella upgrade. Decentralized LSD platforms like Lido currently account for around 33.2% of the total ETH...

Zero-knowledge virtual machines have the potential to revolutionize the portability of smart contracts, removing crypto’s last barrier to mass adoption. Very few projects have come close to matching the security and decentralization of the Ethereum network. However, the inherent overhead of maintaining these two critical features has left Ethereum burdened by low throughput and prohibitively high costs. As a result, alternative layer-1 blockchains (L1s) — which normally sacrifice security and decentralization to provide scale — have emerged to nip away at Ethereum’s market share. However, with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-equivalent scaling solutions bringing high throughput and low transaction fees to Ethereum itself, the question is: Do we really need these alternative L1 networks? Despite a rocky year for the industry, Ethereum is still as strong as ever The risks of sacrificing security and decentralization have been largely materialized with alternative L1s this year. These blo...