Ethereum closes to $2,000 after successful Shapella update

The cost of the leading altcoin has updated its maximum since August 2022, exceeding $1.99 thousand.

The Ethereum (ETH) price approached $2,000 after a successful Shapella update on the network of the leading altcoin on the night of April 13th. For the first time in seven and a half months, the value of the asset rose above $1.99 thousand. According to CoinMarketCap, the first altcoin by capitalization is trading at $1.98 thousand, its value increased by 6.3% per day.

The price of the coin rose after the successful upgrade of the Ethereum network called Shapella. Users can now withdraw previously locked assets from staking. In the half-day since the hard fork ended, almost 135,000 ETH ($268.6 million) have already been withdrawn from staking, according to beaconcha.in.

On the night of April 12-13, the Shapella update was successfully activated on the main Ethereum network. It is now possible to withdraw altcoin from staking.

Leading developers of the Ethereum blockchain, including Vitalik Buterin, watched the update at the Shapella Watch Party , which was broadcast live.

Buterin said that the most difficult and urgent stages of the transition to the Proof-of-Stake protocol on the Ethereum network are largely completed. He noted that the problems of high commissions and network bandwidth (transaction acceleration) will have to be solved further.

According to beaconcha.in , 83.6 thousand ETH ($160.5 million) have been withdrawn from staking in the eight hours since the hard fork.

Nansen’s analytics show that there are 19.6k validators in the altcoin withdrawal queue – about 3.5% of the total number of 567k. The pending withdrawal amount is 705k ETH ($1.35 billion).

At the same time, coins are not only withdrawn, but also added to the stake. After the upgrade, 6.8 thousand ETH ($13.1 million) were deposited.

The bitcoin rate over the past 24 hours, on the contrary, has slightly decreased. The asset fell 0.16% to $30.2 thousand. Ripple (XRP) rose 1.37% to $0.50, Solana (SOL) rose 2.7% to $24.27. The price of Polygon (MATIC) increased by 3.57% to $1.13, Polkadot (DOT) — by 3.17% to $6.47.

The total capitalization of cryptocurrencies increased by 2.1% over the day, to $1.25 trillion, with a daily trading volume of $50 billion.