Quick cheat sheet of things to remember about the Ethereum Merge

Because miners now have to stake their coins in order to mine, this means ETH is removed from the supply that is generally available to sell.

Previously, 80% of a miner's gains (new ETH tokens) would have to be sold the very next day to pay the electric bill. Now none of this has to be sold. So, again, fewer ETH available to be so.ld.

buy the rumour, sell the news. But also, IT'S NOT DOWN. The stock market moves in anticipation. So when ETH was at 900 and BTC was at 19,000 a month or so ago, ETH started moving in anticipation of this ("buy the rumour"). So now, BTC is back at 19,000 and ETH is at....1350, 50% higher than it was.

The Fed. Crypto markets are very sensitive to interest rate hikes because there is much higher leverage that speculators use on defi exchanges than stock traders use on stocks. Meaning, when interest rates rise it costs more to buy crypto and it's easier to get margin calls.

Now that the merge has happened, work begins on 'the surge'. They couldn't even start it until the merge happened. The Surge is when they implement "Sharding" which will bring ETH into the modern world. Visa does about 60,000 transactions per day (or second, I forget). With sharding ETH will be able to do 150,000 transactions in the same time frame.

there will be the verge the purge, the splurge. All of these will enhance scalability and lower transaction fees.

And note again, supply is going down. In a few years, they expect there will be half as many ETH circulating as circulates now. But demand will be much higher. Again, when demand goes up and supply goes down, price goes up.

I own ETH and also own some tokens that are related to the ETH ecosystem (like tokens that make it easier for multiple ETH-based blockchains and exchanges to talk to each other). But I am not recommending anyone do this.

Many exchanges didn't trade ETH for a few days in order to make sure there were no glitches. So trading became weird.

But there are tokens out there that lower gas fees because they try to implement some sharding-like features in "layer two" of the crypto eco-system. This is technical so ignore it.