Ethereum [ETH] is starting to rank among accolades lately as the Merge release date appears closer. The expected- 15 September launch has gripped the crypto community with huge promised incentives.

The upcoming Merge has also led to a spike in the development activity on the Ethereum network in the past few weeks.

This is reflected in Ethereum’s top standing among projects with the highest development activity in the past 30 days.

At a value of 401, Ethereum is currently leading close competitors, such as Polkadot (400), Kusama Network (400), and Cardano (389) on the chart.

Source: G.Crypto/ Twitter

Preparations around the Merge can be considered as the silver linings in the crypto bear market as of now.

The promise of high revenues has attracted many investors into staking ETH 2.0. According to a new update by OKLink, the number of ETH 2.0 deposit contract addresses has now reached 13,343,768.

Meanwhile, the stake rate has exceeded 11.17% as about 36,000ETH have been added weekly while 153,000 new ETH have been staked since August.

Source: OKLink

Additionally, crypto reporter Colin WU reported that Ethereum 2.0 client “Teku” has released version v22.8.1 on the platform. This is the latest measure in line to support the Merge transition in September.

As Wu claims, this is a necessary update that includes the Bellatrix network upgrade and merged transition configuration. All mainnet users must upgrade their own versions by 6 September.

Ethereum itself is striving to rediscover its lost spark since 2018. Only recently, Ethereum’s market volume share hit its highest point since 2018 exceeding its previous peak of 55% during the May 2021 sell-off.

As Kaiko research concludes,

“The volume market share of ETH-USD relative to BTC-USD