The week ahead's three biggest cryptocurrency stories

While it's hard to guess what might happen next in crypto, here are the three biggest stories we expect to set tongues wagging next week.  The post The week ahead's three biggest cryptocurrency stories appeared first on The Block.

Timeline of Ethereum, Torn

Recently, Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum ($ETH), commented on the upcoming “Merge” hard fork, which is when the Ethereum network is making the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

Many of the leading cryptocurrencies experienced double-digit weekly percentage gains despite the ongoing cryptocurrency bear market. In anticipation of the Ethereum merger, top coins increased. After peaking at $2,012 late on Friday night, the price of Ethereum has increased 16% in the past week to $1,986 at the time of writing.

The recent presale sell-out of GNOX tokens is rumored to have been caused by whales from Ethereum and Solana. Gnox's project team had initially set a hard cap for the token sale, but due to overwhelming demand, they increased the cap. However, even this wasn't enough as the sale sold out within a few hours.

It has been quite an interesting week for Ethereum's community as it prepares for a major upgrade. In fact, its impact has started spilling over into Ethereum layer 2 solutions such as Polygon now.

Crypto exchange Coinbase is analyzing the impact that scaling solutions could have on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. In a research report, Coinbase says that layer-2 scaling solutions (L2s) could cannibalize Ethereum's revenue.

Amid the crackdown against Tornado Cash, associated addresses, contributing developers, and anyone who uses the mixing platform, the project's governance token called TORN has shuddered in value. TORN is an ERC20 with a fixed supply that is leveraged for governance proposals and voting.

There is undeniable excitement in the market as the Ethereum Merge draws closer. The same is evident in ETH's price action too, with the same managing to rally back above the $2,000-price level.

CryptoSlate spoke exclusively with a member of the Tornado Cash team who has been granted anonymity for their own protection and will be referred to as “TC Member” for the sake of this article. The post Tornado Cash contributor reveals DAO shut down as it “can't fight the US”, need to keep contributors safe appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Diplomat and founder of the TRON network, Justin Sun, confirmed that one of his addresses was blocked from using the Ethereum decentralize finance (DeFi) protocol Aave. Via Twitter, Sun claimed that he received 0.1 ETH from Tornado Cash leading to his address being added and blocked by the protocol.

Data shows a large amount of leverage has been piling up in the Ethereum futures market as the price of the crypto breaks above $2k. Ethereum Open Interest Surges To Highest Value In Last 4 Months As pointed out by an analyst in a CryptoQuant post, the ETH futures market has seen the leverage sharply going up recently.