Top Crypto News Today: Solana Co-Founder & COO on the Upcoming Etheruem Merge & NFT Markets

The crypto space has been nothing but eventful for the crypto enthusiasts in 2022! Starting from the Crypto market crash to LUNA being depegged from the dollar, to Bitcoin and Ethereum going back and forth on various resistance levels. Apart from that, the Solana based NFT space has also seen a huge boom amidst the various events and the SOL ecosystem continues to provide more to the crypto community. 

Not only is the Solana network introducing an android phone with crypto native features, but the whole of crypto space is almost at the end of Ethereum completing its journey to Merge, where the ETH network is transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus from its previously Proof of Work consensus.

The COO of Solana sat with CoinDesk to talk more about the Ethereum Merge, NFT Marketplace and Network stability. 

Firstly, Gokul spoke about the spike in Solana based NFTs while the whole of the NFT space has been running low by 80% since last year. Based on the past performance of the NFT space, when CryptoKitties made the headlines for being sold out and in demand, the developers predicted a future when more of such demands are expected to come along the way. However, when Solana was built, it had been ‘snappy’ and it took into consideration all of that while being built. 

When asked about any attribution that the Solana ecosystem may have, for such a consistent spike in volumes, Gokul mentioned that the Solana ecosystem in general is on a journey of growth and it is catering towards making a culture of its own. This whole space has been on its own journey even through big market cycles. 

Talking about the Ethereum Merge, Gokul said, given the transition is new, Ethereum still has a long way to go to get comfortable with the Proof of Stake scenario; while Solana have been a Proof of Stake token since the very beginning. The transition of ETH however is an interesting event and something that the whole crypto community is looking forward to.

While asked about the Solana network outages in its journey so far, Gokul mentioned an important point regarding this. He mentioned that the massive growth of the crypto space was not nearly anticipated to be that big. Maybe an year ago there were hardly 10,000 users doing transactions, come to now when the network is transacting millions of transactions, it gave out. The surge in the number of addresses have been an important reason why the Solana network encounters those 4 outages. 

Source: CoinDesk

ETHEREUM MERGE EXPLAINED

According to the definition by the Ethereum Foundation themselves, ‘the Merge represents the joining of the existing execution layer of Ethereum (the Mainnet we use today) with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. It eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining and instead secures the network using staked ETH’.

The main objective behind this mammoth task is primarily to become energy sustainable but also at the same time, to make the blockchain more secure and scalable in the future.