Unique Ethereum TX Count Jumps 40% Ahead of Merge; Overtakes Bitcoin

cryptonews.com:

Unique Ethereum transactions jumped by 40.3% between August 31 and September 4, as Ethereum developers completed the latest Bellatrix upgrade and prepared for next week's Merge. And with yesterday's transaction count residing at 368,463, it has overtaken the corresponding figure for Bitcoin, which stood at 351,285.

This isn't the first time that unique Ethereum transactions have overtaken Bitcoin transactions. However, with the price of ETH as a ratio of BTC's price reaching a high for this year, it hints at a possible 'flippening,' with Ethereum potentially overtaking its bigger rival on a number of dimensions.

It's perhaps no surprise that Ethereum's transaction count has overtaken Bitcoin's, since transaction volumes tend to be correlated with price. And over the past week, ETH's price has risen by 7%, while BTC's has increased by 4%.

In fact, since the lows of mid-June, ETH has risen by an impressive 80%. Meanwhile, BTC has risen by 14.5% across the same period.

This disparity underlines the numerous ways in which Ethereum appears to be catching up -- or overtaking -- Bitcoin. It chimes with the ETH-BTC price ratio, which CoinMarketCap data shows reached a high for 2022 yesterday, of 0.08514 BTC.

Other metrics in which Ethereum outstrips Bitcoin include total number of transactions per day, although Ethereum overtook Bitcoin on this front back in July 2017. More significantly, recent weeks have seen total volumes for ethereum futures overtake those for bitcoin, according to data from Deribit.

Importantly, Deribit's data shows that increases in ETH futures have recently outpaced those for BTC futures, rising by just over 70% since mid-July, compared to 12.9% for Bitcoin perpetual futures.

This fits with reports that