Bitcoin enjoys heatwave

All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.

Bitcoin crossed $23K and is officially making a beeline for $24K. As of 9:18 a.m. (EST), the most humongous crypto was $23,800, having surged 7% in 24 hours. It's BTC's highest mark in five weeks. BTC is up 23% over the past seven days. This latest price action comes amid growing trading volumes, Decrypt said.

In early July, daily trading volumes fell to $16.3 billion. Some $49 billion worth of BTC changed hands yesterday.

A funny thing happened on the way to Polygon formally announcing today at an Ethereum community gathering in Paris that it pretty much solved the infamous "trilemma" plaguing blockchains – Polygon's native asset, MATIC, fell 1.2% in 24 hours to one dime short of a dollar.

The market seems to have already digested rumblings about the launch of Polygon zkEVM, touted as a giant leap in "zero knowledge" (ZK) technology and straight-up game-changer in terms of executing Ethereum transactions in a secure, scalable and decentralized manner, all at the same time, a long-sought industry holy grail.

In cryptography, a ZK proof is a means of trustless authentication, that is, without an exchange of passwords; ZK technology is what undergirds Ethereum Virtual Machine "rollups" like Polygon zkEVM which bundles smaller transactions, relaying them over to the Ethereum blockchain as a single transaction to reduce cost.

Polygon said zkEVM would be the “first Ethereum-equivalent scaling solution that works seamlessly with all existing smart contracts, developer tools and wallets.”

Wake us up when "The Merge" is over. On second thought, let's follow this event even more closely.

It’s a high stakes race, ETH against the world, and itself. That there’s now a layer-2, zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine scaling solution in the form of Polygon zkEVM should be warmly welcomed. Time to sit back and watch the transaction fees plummet.

Actually, Ethereum's average gas fee, now about $1.57, hasn't been this low since late 2020 when ETH was transitioning from a $600 price level to one closer to $700. Like summer giving way to autumn, the much-publicized Merge event, which describes ETH's transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining consensus to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), is fast approaching.

Pulling off the implementation of consensus-based upgrades, with test runs continuing through the end of August, isn't a fait accompli – any Murphy's Law adhering developer can attest to that. Nor is the timeline cemented, although Sept. 19 has been floated merely as tentative target date for full-blown mainnet Merge completion.

"It's extremely exciting to see it coming together," tweeted Tim Beiko, an in-house Ethereum developer, per Cointelegraph.

"Virtually all that’s left before The Merge takes place is a dress rehearsal," The Defiant said.

Ethereum’s developers hope the code for The Merge will undergo minimal changes following deployments on a testnet, known as the Goerli network, prior to hitting the mainnet. The final testnet deployment is set to go live in three weeks.