On the Google search engine, when you search for “The Merge” you will see a countdown appear. A nice little easter egg showing the project launch date for the second flagship crypto: Ethereum. Let’s see together the incredible enthusiasm generated by the project in a few figures.
There are only 2 days left before the launch of The Merge
To see this counter, just go to Google Search USA (not available on Google France) and type “The Merge” in the search bar.
The counter shows several pieces of information, in particular the “Cryptocurrency Difficulty” which refers to the difficulty of mining the blocks necessary for the blockchain.
There is also the “Hash Rate”, ie the computing power required for mining cryptocurrency.
Today the hashrate for The Merge is estimated to be around 860 TH/s, which represents an astronomical amount of calculations per second. In fact, 1 TH or exahash also known as 1 quintillion of calculation or billion trillion.
We owe this little countdown to Sam Padilla, a developer at Google Cloud. The employee was quick to share this little Easter egg on Twitter. However, he clarified that this integration with Google Search was also the work of the internal research team.
Hey @VitalikButerin @drakejustin & others @ethereum folks, go google “the merge” for a fun little surprise & appreciation.
Everyone is excited for what is to come and grateful for the work that has been going on here for years. pic.twitter.com/3bgifV6Ywn
—Sam Padilla (@theSamPadilla) September 9, 2022
We can also see a white panda and a black panda walking towards each other. The closer we get to The Merge’s final date, the closer the pandas get. The white panda represents the “Consensus Layer“and the black panda stands for him”Execution Layer“. These Series, which are part of The Merge, will help improve the Ethereum Blockchain. In particular, they will increase the speed and capacity of transactions or improve security while reducing their cost.
The Merge will be complete when the 2 pandas have merged, ie the September 15, 2022.
Pandas are well-known animals in Ethereum meme culture, hence the choice of the developers to use this symbolic animal for this countdown.
Interest has never been so high
The merger always arouses the curiosity of investors. In fact, if we look at the trends on google trend here what we can find.
Since August, interest in The Merge has continued to grow. So we note that huge infatuation around the event.
If we look at the countries with the strongest interest, we see Luxembourg at the top of the list, followed by Greece, Singapore, North Macedonia and finally Lithuania. China is in 17th place, followed by the United States. France is only 39th in terms of “The Merge” research.
Despite this increased interest, Ethereum seems to be dead and there is no real uptrend. In fact, during the last month, it oscillates between 1900 € and 1400 € without ever going over the symbolic threshold of 2000 €.
At the time of writing, Ethereum (ETH) is at €1711.08 and has lost 1.66% in the last 24 hours. Some experts predict that Ethereum will reach its ATH (All Time High) again during the year 2023 thanks to The Merge.
ETH domain names are also on the rise. While some are to facilitate payment methods, others use it for speculative purposes. In fact, these domain names are selling like hot cakes since their price has increased by 10 years in just 2 months.
In any case, the entire crypto community has its eyes on the merger. We’ll see in 2 days if this hype around The Merge is justified or if it’s a flop.
