The successful deployment of The Merge on the Ethereum’s Goerli testnet fueled the price of ETH. It reached $1900, but then dropped below this mark. However, some crypto enthusiasts expect the price of ETH to demonstrate strong growth ahead of The Merge on the mainnet in September. Prominent bitcoin trader Michael van der Poppe forecast that ETH may grow as high as $2500, and BTC to follow this trend reaching $30,000.

Cryptoasset investor and entrepreneur Ryan Adams, founder of Bankless, supposed that The Merge marks the return of the bull dominance on the crypto market.

However, other crypto traders do not believe that The Merger should be considered as the main driver of the ETH price growth. Cryptorg CEO Andrei Podolyan believes that the current price of the asset already takes into account the successful update of the mainnet.

"I don’t expect significant movements due to The Merge [on the mainnet], I think the current price already includes it," Podolyan said in a conversation with Metatalks.

According to him, the ETH price is more dependent on the general mood of crypto investors.

"Within a bearish scenario for Bitcoin or if the Merge update runs unsuccessfully on the mainnet, ETH price may return to $1400. In the case of a successful update and a stable state of the crypto market, ETH is likely to move to the $2500 area."

Sergey Simanovsky, co-founder and co-host of Citizen Cosmos and developer at cyber~Congress, adds that The Merge will be almost certainly accompanied by the hardfork and ETHPOW birth.

"Many ask themselves if they should buy Ethereum now to get ETHPOW for free. They can prefer not to buy, but to borrow ETH. There are many DeFi protocols on the market to borrow ETH, go long not with your own money and thus get more exposure. But after minting ETHPOW, it makes sense to sell them immediately, as major Ethereum protocols announced support of a PoS version of Ethereum."

Tone Vays, bitcoin analyst and financial educator, expects that the PoW version of Ethereum will be the decentralized one.

"Not sure it if will succeed, but will be interesting to watch."

Ethereum developers successfully complete testing of The Merge upgrade on the Goerli testnet earlier this week. The Merge on Goerli is the final check of the update before deploying the update in the mainnet. The Merge will lead to the transition of the Ethereum network from energy-intensive Proof-of-Work to a greener Proof-of-Stake consensus. Furthermore, the transition to PoS will result in a sharp gas fee reduction, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin forecasted.

Tentatively, the Merger will take place on the main network in mid-September 2022, approximately on September 15 or 16. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko tweeted that the expected cumulative network difficulty (TTD) after The Merge will reach 587500000000000000000000.

On July 27, Ethereum announced the Bellatrix upgrade to Goerli’s beacon chain, Prater, in preparation for the testnet merge. After the Bellatrix beacon chain was activated on August 4, all that was left was for it to merge with Goerli, so it the testnet could continue to run on the PoS chain.

The two previous tests of The Merge upgrade took place on the Ropsten and Sepolia testnets and were also successfully completed.