Vitalik Buterin says The Merge is Not 'Priced in' as Investor Promises to Fork Ethereum

cryptonews.com:

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin argued that The Merge is not "priced in," not only in market terms, but also in psychological narrative terms. Meanwhile, a well-known investor has voiced his plans to fork Ethereum.

Commenting on the morale around Ethereum developers during this year's Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), Buterin said it is all "genuine" now contrary to 2018 and 2019 when the Ethereum elites had "forced high morale" in order to keep up everyone else's spirits.

However, he noted that while The Merge is "looking more and more in the front view mirror," it is still not "priced in" - both in market terms and in psychological narrative terms.

Buterin claimed that some people still think that the much-touted proof-of-stake (PoS) is merely a "noise" and that most people believe it "is not going anywhere," adding that The Merge might not get priced in until it happens.

As a reminder, The Merge is Ethereum's much-anticipated upgrade when the current Ethereum Mainnet merges with the beacon PoS system. In other words, The Merge will see Ethereum completely shed the proof-of-work (PoW) system it currently uses in favor of PoS.

As reported, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko proposed September 19 as the tentative date for The Merge.

Notably, Ethereum’s tenth "shadow fork" went into effect on Tuesday, 26 hours ahead of schedule, at 11:45 UTC at block 15217902 when Terminal Total Difficulty (TTD) was overridden.

Meanwhile, Chandler Guo, a well-known miner, angel investor, and adviser in Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum startups, apparently aims to fork Ethereum as the chain prepares to transition to PoS, so another version of Ethereum stays on Pow.

At 7:31 UTC on Thursday, ETH is trading at USD 1,636, up by 11.8% over the past