The anticipation had supported ether this year, even as inflation and monetary tightening shackled Bitcoin.
The timing of the merge – Ethereum’s ETH1 chain will meld with a new chain to create ETH2 – remains unclear, although many crypto watchers expect it to happen some time this year.
Yet Bitcoin remains just an investment without any real ability to be used for contracts in decentralized finance applications.
“We are seeing funds rotate into Ethereum in preparation for the merge, even though we don’t know when it’s going to be,” said Noelle Acheson, head of market insights at Genesis Trading.
Ethereum has long been hobbled by issues of speed and processing costs.
“Ethereum maxis, people who believe in ‘the flippening’, believe it will come very soon,” said Acheson at Genesis Trading.