Ethereum Liquidations Top $157M After Merge Upgrade Test Hits Snag

As bears circle crypto and traditional markets, Ethereum has faced the brunt of it.

Ethereum is currently trading hands at $1,770, down roughly 3.4% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap. The bearish trend is the latest in what has been a rather red week for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. 

Over the past seven days, Ethereum shed more than 16% of its value, tumbling from $2,077 on Monday to as low as $1,731 in the early hours on Friday. It has since recovered some, however, and currently stands at around $1,770, down 3.5% on the day.

This drastic price shift also led to over $157.26 million in Ethereum liquidations, according to data pulled from coinglass. More than 75% of these liquidations were long positions from bullish crypto traders. 

The impetus for the asset’s recent price action is multi-pronged. 

Perhaps most notable, however, was a recent hang-up related to Ethereum’s incoming merge event slated for August.

The merge will see the current proof-of-work (PoW) version of Ethereum merge with its proof-of-stake (PoS) counterpart. This counterpart is technically called the Beacon Chain and has been in operation since December 2020. 

Once complete, the PoW-based version will end, effectively making Ethereum a PoS blockchain network, bringing with it a host of new benefits.  

On Wednesday, however, the Beacon Chain, a sort of ghost version of Ethereum running in parallel to the current Ethereum, experienced a block reorganization event. Such an event means that for a brief moment the Beacon Chain had been forked, and blocks of transactions were being processed on yet another parallel version of the Beacon Chain. 

Since then, the network has begun producing blocks uninterrupted, according to block explorer BeaconScan. A post-mortem is expected soon, according to Core Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon.