This Week on Crypto Twitter: Ethereum Merges, Hoskinson Gets Salty, Concerns Over Centralized

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

It was merge week. Ethereum’s long-awaited overhaul was finalized without a hitch, but there was no sudden influx of capital, either. Ethereum’s price actually fell 8% to below $1,500 on Thursday, the day of the merge. At the time of writing it trades for $1,376, about 22% cheaper than it was last Sunday.

A day before the merge, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a graph from etherchain.org showing the network’s hash rate has maintained consistency, despite negative predictions from certain forecasters.

Looks like the “hashrate will drop weeks before the merge due to miners rushing to sell ahead of everyone else” thesis has been proven completely false.

I’m a bit surprised! I argued against a 50% drop but definitely expected like 5-10%. pic.twitter.com/l9OpT8fPFl

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 14, 2022

The following day, Thursday, Buterin broke the news that the network’s transition to proof-of-stake (PoS) was complete:

And we finalized!

Happy merge all. This is a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem. Everyone who helped make the merge happen should feel very proud today.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 15, 2022

Beeple, the digital artist whose NFT collection “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” sold for an unprecedented $69.3 million through a Christie’s auction, ushered in the new era with a purple vision of Ethereum mining in the future:

A blockchain developer named Miguel Piedrafita said that after the merge, Ethereum was 99.95% more energy efficient, becoming vastly greener than a typical tech company.

The upgrade even slightly outdid Ethereum’s energy projections. A report released on the day from the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI), commissioned by Ethereum-centric software firm ConsenSys, claims that Ethereum now uses approximately 99.99% less energy post-merge.

Former Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson, who now heads competitor Cardano—which has a market cap of $16.4 billion—was feeling salty. He posted a meme likening the merge to a nightmare. When someone tweeted him asking where Cardano’s technology stands in relation to Ethereum, Hoskinson let rip with some flagrant self-promotion:

About three years ahead on research, two on engineering. They will one day figure out that slashing is a really really bad idea

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 15, 2022

Crypto market intelligence firm Santiment sounded a note of caution over how centralized Ethereum staking had become after the merge.

This was a common complaint. According to Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of DeFi platform Gnosis, popular crypto exchage Coinbase and liquidity staking pool Lido Finance together account for 42% of post-merge Ethereum validators, and the top seven entities control more than two thirds of the stake validating transactions. Köppelmann also ran a poll in which three quarters of 15,885 respondents agreed that Coinbase and…