ETH Tanks But SG Crypto Community Still Bullish Post-Merge

It’s finally happened. Ethereum has merged and moved to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. However, ETH’s price has since crashed to below US$1,500, so how does Singapore’s crypto community feel about the highly anticipated shift?

To find out, Blockhead went down to The Merge Watch Party organised by ethSG with Ethereum Foundaiton representatives at SUSS (Singapore University of Social Sciences). Whilst the price of ETH hadn’t dropped significantly immediately after the Merge, attendees told Blockhead they were still bullish for ETH no matter the short-term price fluctuations.

21-year-old Whales Lee – the President of SMU Blockchain Club  – was at The Merge Watch Party until 3am on Thursday morning, and returned later that day to watch the Merge unfold.

“This marks a very, very big change with one of the biggest global virtual machine layer ones,” Lee told Blockhead. “There will most likely be some complications along the way but I think it’s worth the experimentaiton.”

Giang Diem Quynh – founder of ETH Vietnam host SUCI – had just flown in from Saigon for the Merge and told Blockhead, “I believe in the long term, so I don’t really care about the short term price.”

“The Merge is a milestone for Ethereum,” she continued. “A lot of things will happen for the blockchain and web3 ecosystem. We hope with this milestone, Ethereum can scale and we can build things that are sustainable for hundreds of years.”

Minutes after the Merge happened, Ethereum Foundation represenative Dustin told Blockhead he was “really excited that it had gone through.”

“It’s become something like Y2K, not in the sense that, nothing happened, but nothing happened because there was a lot of work that people put into it. The fact that the biggest network in the world has been moved from one consensus algorithm to another, and done it live, it’s really a testiment to the amount of work the core developers have done for the last five to six years.”

Read more: The Merge is Happening. Here’s What You Need to Know

“The amount of work that they put in, I think it’s really justified all of the delays, because it’s almost an impossible task, if you think about the scale of what you need to do, and all the checks that you need to do to make sure that something like that goes through.”

In the long term, Dustin said the Merge will provide “building blocks to allow scaling such as EIP-4844.”

Raman Sha – founder of Crypto Jobs List – described the merge as “an exciting accomplishment.”

“We are now 99%+ more energy efficient and are looking forward to more scalability happening on chain,” he said. “In the long run, there will be more sustainability and people will be throwing fewer stones at the chain. Time will show. Being able to bridge between L2s and being able to move your assets across different chains – that’s what I’m looking forward to myself.”

Bree Yek – CEO of carb0n.fi – is particularly excited about how The Merge will transform Ethereum into a more environmentally friendly blockchain.

“The core driver of the Merge is about optimization,” Yek tells us. “It’s about making the system a lot more effective, making it user friendly and making it sustainable and scalable. When we built our project, we chose Polygon because it was Proof-of-Stake.”

“So naturally, being from a sidechain of Ethereum, I’m very excited that Ethereum is also moving to Proof-of-Stake in terms of an environmental footprint. Overall, it does help in actually reducing the amount of energy consumption.”