First Mover Americas: Ether Holds Above $2K

The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for April 17, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk's daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

Timeline of Ethereum

As Ethereum's (CRYPTO: ETH) Shapella hard fork began, allowing users to withdraw their staked Ether, over 1.03 million ETH worth $2.1 billion was withdrawn within the first four days. What Happened: According to the beaconcha.in, the withdrawals were made through 473,700 withdrawal requests, the highest withdrawal day being April 15, with 392,800 ETH being taken out.

This decentralized, global team of developers is ignoring the urge to be the first to scale Ethereum. For its holistic approach to build broadly and transparently, Scroll is one of CoinDesk's Projects to Watch 2023.

One of the first projects to integrate the intriguing new mechanism of Account Abstraction has already gotten Visa on board to secure payments processing for crypto transactions. That's why StarkNet is a 2023 Project to Watch.

Ethereum has found a lot of resistance after $2,100 as bears are ramping up their activities once more. The digital asset saw a good run last week following the Shapella upgrade given that withdrawals from the Ethereum Beacon contract were not as high as expected.

Ethereum (ETH), the world's second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has been in the news for several positive reasons all month long. Over the past 24 hours, the digital currency has soared to an 11-month high of $2,137.45.

Nearly $2 billion worth of Ethereum (ETH) is set to be unstaked after the top smart contract platform's Shapella update went live last week. In a new report, crypto analytics platform IntoTheBlock finds that 868,631 of staked ETH, worth more than $1.8 billion at time of writing, are currently in queue waiting to be withdrawn.

Four days after the Ethereum (ETH) Shapella upgrade, more than 1 million ETH has been withdrawn, according to beaconcha.in data. According to the data, 1.04 million ETH has been withdrawn from the 491,037 processed withdrawals.

The finalization of Ethereum's Shanghai hard fork, also known as Shapella, was completed at around 22:42 UTC. The completion marks a new era for Ethereum, allowing users to withdraw their staked ETH and secure and validate transactions conducted on the Ethereum blockchain.

Former Goldman Sachs executive Raoul Pal says that there's one big overlooked opportunity in the Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem. The macro guru tells his nearly one million Twitter followers that CryptoPunks, one of the biggest non-fungible token (NFT) projects in existence, are starting to look appealing.

ALSO: In his latest Money Reimagined column, CoinDesk Chief Content Officer Michael Casey writes that to prevent the potentially destructive impact of AI, we need open-source innovation and collective governance that is possible through blockchain protocols and Web3, not the monopoly defaulting structure of Web2.