Upping the stakes

Ethereum remains affixed to a key level — just slightly above $1,800 — as the network hurtles toward a consequential upgrade.

ETH, second-largest crypto, has been lurching sideways for going on a month. The upgrade, dubbed Pectra, is set for Wednesday. It'll usher in an era of more user-friendly wallets, enhanced rollup scalability and dramatically raise the staking cap from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH. 

Expect some volatility. This is a heavy lift. Exchanges could temporarily halt ETH transactions during deployment. "Technical hiccups might erode confidence," BeInCrypto said, noting how the Pectra upgrade already has faced multiple delays. A smooth rollout, on the other hand, could spur a rally, BeInCrypto added.

Apparently, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin can smell change in the air. In a blog post Saturday, Buterin boldly proposed replacing Ethereum's Virtual Machine (EVM), an instruction set architecture custom-built for Ethereum, with RISC-V, a free, open-source interface for defining how software communicates with hardware, "potentially making some operations up to 100 times faster while keeping existing smart contracts working," Decrypt said.

Buterin's proposal (make Ethereum simple, essentially) could "break backward compatibility, while requiring massive developer retraining," Kronos analyst Dominick John told Decrypt.

Buterin concedes the change could take up to five years. That might seem like a long time. But wasn't it only yesterday that Ethereum started its staking era with the launch of the Beacon Chain? No, that was in December of 2020. And since then, staking has been bound to increments of 32 ETH. After the update, 32 ETH will become the minimum, while 2048 ETH will be the maximum effective balance (maxEB) a validator can stake. Right now, there are more than one million active validators, each individually committing 32 ETH.

"Many of these are run by professional staking operators, who run multiple validators on behalf of entities who may have balances equal to or higher than 32 ETH," points out Blockdaemon's Conor Kelville.

But as the number of validators has grown, so too has protocol traffic and the level of compute carried out by nodes, adding to network overheads, he explains. Pectra's "EIP-7251" proposal aims to reduce the number of validator nodes needed to secure the network.

The total crypto market fell 2.8% over the past 24 hours. It stood at $3.04 trillion as of 8:48 a.m. (EST), according to CoinGecko.

U.S. equity index futures were tumbling before the bell. Looks like the S&P 500's extensive winning streak could be in jeopardy. The blue chip barometer being up nine days in a row is a rare feat, one that only has happened 0.25% of the time in the past century (HedgeEye).

Turning to politics, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed the state's Bitcoin Reserve Bill. Hobbs referred to crypto investing as "untested."

Bitcoin, as of about 9:30 a.m. (EST), was $94,150, down 1.3% in the past day.

In an X post on Sunday, an early-days Bitcoin developer named Charlie Shrem claimed he was working on a "faucet" website for doling out BTCs supposedly purely for the sake of stoking wider take-up.

Shrem is known for his role co-founding BitInstant and the Bitcoin Foundation. He served one year in prison in 2015 in connection with a money laundering allegation that tied into the allegations surrounding BitInstant's role facilitating Silk Road activity alleged to be illicit. After his release in 2016, Shrem returned to crypto, founding Druid Ventures, a crypto VC fund. He also launched a podcast.

So-called faucets, such as one created by Gavin Andresen back in 2010, helped spur BTC adoption in the early days, as Cointelegraph noted. "The faucets encouraged wallet creation and transactions, which assisted with the expansion of Bitcoin’s user base and network activity," Cointelegraph said.

Andresen’s Bitcoin Faucet page, in what is the best-known example, gave out nearly 20,000 coins (now worth about $2B) for solving "CAPTCHA" tasks (normally used to distinguish humans from machines).

Other websites started offering similar services. However, Cointelegraph said, as BTC’s price increased and transaction fees rose in the middle part of the last decade, the model became unsustainable.