Crypto market cap climbs 15% after the Ethereum merge date revelation and the rising sentiment and token prices suggest that the event will catalyze a new recovery in the crypto prices so let’s have a closer look today at our latest cryptocurrency news.

It has been a volatile week for crypto as traders ignored the warnings from the crypto winter veterans that there were a lot of downsides in store and then jumped back in the market at the first sign of the rising prices. The evidence for the reversal in sentiment can be found in the Crypto Fear and Greed Index which climbed into the fear zone after spending a record time in the fear territory because of collapsing prices in both June and May. As for what sparked the rally out of the fear territory, the look across the timeline points to the announcement of the expected date for the ETH merge.

Lido is launching stETH on Layer 2 🏝️

Ethereum is scaling, and so is Lido.

Lido stakers will soon be able to use their stETH assets in DeFi on Layer 2.

Read more about it here: https://t.co/QCsQry4V41

— Lido (@LidoFinance) July 18, 2022

The data from TradingView shows that after the Merge date revelation, the price of ETH increased 38.5% from $1190 to a high of $1650 amid the green day on the market. Alogn with the climbing price of ETH, the total crypto market cap increased 15% in the past week to the current value of $1.051 trillion. Evidence shows that the excitement around Ethereum’s transition to PoS is fueling the rally and can be found by looking at the main gainers over the past week including multiple projects related to the smart contract protocol.

With ethereum switching over to PoS, the vast mining network that secures the network will be orphaned and in need of a new chain to mine. Ethereum Classic is one of the best options in terms of network design and compatibility since it will be the original Proof of work chain. The ETC price gained 100% over the past nine days and it suggests that there’s a large contingent of the traders that anticipate a miner migration to Ethereum Classic that can bode well for the tokens in the long-term.

The other gainer from the ETH developments is Lido which is a staking platform that allows depositors to stake their ETH for stETH which is a one-for-one representation that can be used as collateral in decentralzied finance. The data from Tradingview shows that since the Merge data was revealed, the LDO price rallied 80%. on top of the momentum gained from the connection with Ethereum Merge, the price of LDO benefited from the support of other protocols like SOL and DOT.