 Hello friends and thanks for hanging out with us here on the Marker Report today on Cointelegraph. I'm your host Benton and we're joined again by our resin experts, Marcel Peckman and Sam Borgie. Sam Borgie has just entered Cointelegraph where he brings a decade of experience in economic analysis and financial market writing. Marcel Peckman applies his 17 years of experience trading derivatives options and futures to the crypto derivatives markets. Fellows, here we are again. It's another week, another Marker Report. Glad to have everyone here. Marcel, what's going on this week? How are we feeling now? Hey Benton. Well, I think I'm as depressed as everyone and as surprised as everyone to see that Ethereum kind of decoupled from Bitcoin because even yesterday we saw a brief rally with Bitcoin but an Ethereum along but five minutes later Bitcoin is down and Ethereum continues climbing up. So I think for Ethereum investors it's going to be good two weeks as we approach the merge but for Bitcoin investors themselves we're kind of still depressed. All right. And Sam, what's going on this week? Big news with ETH coming up next week, the big merge. Everyone's been talking about it. How are we feeling? Well, in general, this is a recording. You know, my mood has not changed, my old has not changed. It's basically status quo right now. We are in a volatile season being September so we'll see if my expectations play out over the next month or two. As Marcel said, there is some positive catalysts around Ethereum and I think that it will probably pump into the merge which I think right now is still related for the 13th to 15th but overall market conditions are what they are. There's really not a lot of volumes, not a lot of buyers coming in. Everything's been flushed out of the system so that's going to take a long time to rebuild especially when you consider the macro climate that we're in right now. I just appreciate your staunchness of your view. It never changes. You always have that zoomed out view. He's just the steady rock in the stormy seas. So we got to love Sam's solid perspective here on the overall macro of the markets. Folks, we had a great show lined up today. I want to thank everyone for joining in. I see Vinod in there, crypto cloud, Ismala. Thanks for jumping in. We always love having our viewers tune into the Mark Report on Tuesdays at 12 p.m. If you haven't liked and subscribed, go ahead and do so now. Smash the notification button so you know. Sometimes we are dropping special episodes as well with big breaking news. Maybe next week we will be doing that around the ETH merge depending on how things go. But today is a heavy episode. Focus around Ethereum. What's next? What's your strategy and approach to the merge? What should you be doing? So we're going to be diving into a lot of that stuff. And then we're going to be talking about some of the macros. What's happening in the world and what's happening in the traditional markets that will have an impact on the crypto markets. You want to make sure you stay tuned today so you get all the facts around what's going on out there in the world. But first, we have our weekly roundup video with some of the biggest headlines around the crypto-twitterverse. So Danilo, let's go ahead and jump into our weekly roundup video this week. Week full of headlines. I see PJ in the chat there. When is the merge? Vitalik said in between September 13th and 15th. So we got your back. It's coming up next week and we'll definitely be covering that here on the Mark Report. But next thing that we got today is we got to get some memes. Let's have some fun here before we dive into some of the market news. So Adrian Danilo, let's go ahead. Let's pull up the memes. Let's have a good laugh here before we jump into the goods. All right, first meme of the day. When you listen to what a crypto expert says, when you did what the crypto expert said, it's why we never give financial advice here in the show, guys. Never ever financial advice. It's always the crystal ball out there. Come on, ETH carrying a crypto mark. Ah. Oh, how the tables have turned. Joke of the century. At least for the next month. I've started to trade crypto. What would you recommend I buy? Antidepressants. Yeah, it's about that. All right, right about now. It's all my door difference. It's like, yeah, we're still early. That's what I keep telling myself. So I go to sleep at night. My precious green candle charts after three, five months of negative candles. Yeah, that's about it. Yeah. All right, earlier this year, we had that 13 candles in a row or something like that. How many red candles we get in a row is like a record. That was, that was a meme of itself right there. A lot of pain. The crypto world hasn't dirt and I have a feeling it's not over. So get ready, buckle up the chin straps, strap in folks. It's going to be a wild ride for the next year. First things first, let's go ahead and get into some of our market news here. First headline that we have. This is a great headline, by the way, written by friend of the show, Yashu Gola. Danilo, if you want to go ahead and pull up this article, surge or purge, why the merge may not save Ether price from September? Love it. That was a great headline. Well, what Yashu really writes about here is three factors that could potentially lead to East downside. He's talking about sell the merge news, which is coming up a lot of people saying buy the rumor, sell the news of the actual event. Then you have a hawkish fed and then you have a giant Ether bear flag. So in this particular chart, here he is talking about the three, let me see. This is talking about logging price of gains between June and September, Ether still trades almost 70% below its record high around $4,950 on November 2021. Possibility of heading lower still remains in the card. So this is just a quick price chart here of the one week price. We are hovering right around $1,500 right now. We're seeing these little percentage kick down and up each day. But with this sell the Ethereum merge news coming up, are you guys expecting a huge sell-off after the merge? Is this going to be a potentially big mover? And then now we have to talk about two different assets, ETH proof of work versus ETH proof of stake. Let's break that down real quick. What are your expectations around just volatility after the merge? I'll start with Sam here first. Sure. So I think this is a really, really big day for Ethereum and a really massive development. We've been watching this for a long time. I do expect there to be a lot of buying activity leading into the merge. I don't really know what that means for price. If we were in a normal market condition, I could maybe estimate how high ETH can go, which is given how flat the overall market is, given how subdued the mood is. I don't know how high the upside is going to be in terms of price, but I do expect there to be a significant run up as more people load up on ETH heading into the merge. And if my experience is any indication, it's going to be a buy the rumors, sell the fact type of event. That's not necessarily groundbreaking, but a lot of investors do sell on the news because the gains are pretty much priced in than prior to the actual event happening. So that's my general takeaway from what I expect heading into the merge and we'll probably end up seeing a somewhat of a sell-off after the fact. Excellent. What is your take? What do you expect? I would agree with Sam had we not been on a bear market for the past, I don't know, eight months or so, because right now it doesn't make sense for someone to say, okay, I know that cryptos as a whole and even risk markets like stocks and oil are going down, but I'm going to place a directional bet on Ethereum, direction being I'm going to buy Ethereum and do not make hedge or do not sell Bitcoin or do not sell Ethereum futures, because I think the merge is going to be good and et cetera. I don't think anyone would be risking to do that on a bear market. So I think yes, there has been some buying activity, but that was a month ago. That was like two weeks, three weeks ago. I don't think that on the two or three days preceding the event, we're going to see a inflow. As for the selling pressure after the events, yeah, I think that's something that at least the bears are going to try to act down the price a couple of hundred dollars. I don't think it's going to sustain because if the Ethereum merge is successful, it's a good thing for Ethereum. It relies on decentralized applications. It needs fast transactions and fast and cheap compromises. We've seen what competitors can do with NFTs, with DeFi, with games and Metaverse, and right now Ethereum cannot do that, only using layer two scaling solutions. So if the Ethereum merge is successful, even if it drops a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars after merge, it's going to quickly recover that. Yeah. And the other point I want to make from from Yashu's article, Sam, do you have something to say? No, I generally agree with Marcel. I mean, I think that for us to get any kind of sustained massive price spike, it would require people outside of crypto buying. I don't really see that happening. Those who are buying right now are probably us D gens, who are still on the market, the few remaining of us who know what the merge is all about and the potential value that we can accrue from this event. But in terms of institutional capital flooding in with, you know, half a billion dollars, there's really no, there's no demand right now. So I don't see that materializing in the next couple of weeks. No. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And just kind of looking at volumes right now, you're seeing just kind of minimal, even though ETH is kind of spiking in price, a few percentage points here and there, just the volumes are nothing near what we saw in early 2021. The other point that Yashu makes here in the article is talking about the hawkish Fed and this kind of like downside case for Ethereum. You had last week, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated the central bank's commitment to curbing inflation, noting they must keep at it until the job is done, which is something we talked about last week. So potentially seeing interest rates around 0.5 to 0.7% in their next policy meeting. This does bring up kind of some more macro topics here about the possible implications of what's happening in the world. So not only are you kind of like looking at the Fed, but you're seeing rising energy crisis in Europe. So I want to talk about this real quick. This is, you know, a headline with the Nord Stream pipeline potentially being shut down last week. What is the potential impact here to the greater markets and what are you seeing impact on crypto? I'll start this one out with Sam. Well, I think that the, you know, European energy crisis is actually maybe just getting started. And we can actually see over the next six to eight months, you know, skyrocketing prices, and there's huge geopolitical implications with Russia and the war in Ukraine. I'm not quite sure how Europe is going to respond to this. Are they going to give in to demands? Are they going to print more money? Are they going to do yield curve control? What are they going to do? I'm not quite sure. But I think that the European energy crisis is going to spark perhaps a much bigger crisis. And that kind of feeds back into what the central banks are doing now, which is raising interest rates. How much longer can they do this? I mean, I've long said the Fed and the other central banks will continue raising rates until they break something. And there's still more leeway for them to continue hiking. But at what point do things get so bad that we have to have a reversal, of course? I know people are betting on that happening in the next few months. I've long said they're not going to begin that process until next year. But that's a really huge wild card when it comes to the European energy crisis. Marcel, is there any potential impact that you're seeing from this energy crisis playing out in the more broader markets? What's your take on kind of what you're seeing? Yeah, man. I think the big question here is how the stock market or the oil market and the broader risk market is going to impact cryptocurrencies. Because in theory, they have no direct relationship, meaning why should Bitcoin and Ethereum drop 20% or 30% if the stock market is down 15%. Still, investors perceive cryptocurrency investments as a risk or some technology bet. Yeah, they're going against the banks and the Federal Reserve. It's a new money transmission system. And they also have those DeFi applications. So I think they're kind of a fintech stock. So investors who are away from this market, who do not understand how the workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the other coins perceive this investment as a risk investment because they think that in the end, well, maybe central banks or the banks themselves or Amazon and Google will solve this issue. They'll have their own currency or digital currency or whatever. They may use the blockchain technology and implement their own solution. So they think that Bitcoin and Ethereum will cease to exist or lose their dominance someday. So I don't see this relation. So if the stock market collapses another 30% or 40%, it will cause Bitcoin to go down to $12,000. I don't see a direct relationship here. But yes, we're going to be deeply impacted. And there's nothing the Federal Reserve can do to stop the energy prices from going up. If you print more money, you get more inflation. So there's no easy solution for them. And while we're kind of on this topic of some of the macro stuff, what are we expecting for the next CPI print? Folks are talking about how consumer codes prices are starting to shallow off. Gas prices here in the US are going down significantly. But the one thing that really hasn't been affected that much, we've seen a slight downtick is in the housing market. So what are we expecting with the next CPI print considering that housing makes up a huge bulk of that statistic there? Sam, if you want to go ahead and jump in here. Sure. Well, I've predicted a long time ago, several months ago, that we would probably peak on the CPI in June. And we got a reading of 9.1 in June. In July, we had a down tick, I think, to 8.5. I still hold my thesis that we probably peaked on the CPI in June. That doesn't mean that CPI is going to go way lower. The energy component is a pretty big component. And right now, you take a look at oil prices, they are down significantly from the record. So we are starting to see CPI edge lower. However, I don't think it's going to be enough for the Fed to pivot anytime soon, because a lot of this ties into what the Fed is going to do. If you take a look at Fed fund futures prices right now, you'll see that 100% of futures traders are betting on a rate hike at the September FOMC bash. September is a big meeting, because it's after the summer. It also has the quarterly economic projections, the dot plot summary, all that crap. I think that we take a look at the non-farm payrolls that came out last week. We saw a brisk hiring of, I think, what was it, $315,000? And a lot of people took that as negative, because that means that the economy is still overheated, which gives the Fed more leeway to cut rates. I think overall, when you see strong job growth, that's going to be a positive in general. But from the perspective of the Fed, what the Fed is doing, I do think there's more leeway to raise rates. Right now, most investors are betting on a 75 basis point increase, whereas a minority are betting on a 50 basis point increase. So it's still status quo with the Fed. Go ahead, Marcel. Sam, there's two things here. First, as Benton said, we had a slight housing market price decline, so less mortgage for them to pay for those new entrants on the market. And also, the United States used their strategic oil reserves to export mostly to Europe to reduce, to contain the price pressure on oil. So yes, it negatively affected the inflation, so it's going to negatively affect the CPI. But they're not addressing the issue right now, which is the energy crisis. They're using their strategic reserves. So in my mind, they're camouflaging somewhat the CPI. So they're trying to print good numbers, but they're not solving the issue. But what do you think? Oh, I mean, the CPI is borderline fraud, as it is, right? We see so much manipulation in the CPI over the years. And I've long said that. I mean, the actual real inflation is much higher than what the CPI suggests. Government economists have a vested interest in understating the impact of inflation, whether it's swapping out steak for ground beef, whether it's doing that owner's equivalent rent when it comes to home prices, when it does all sorts of shady shit is done to CPI. So I agree that the CPI is not a reliable measure in that sense. But the energy component does play a big role in it. So right now, energy prices more or less are down. Marcel mentioned some of the reasons why. If we see another resurgence in prices through the energy crisis going on in Europe, that could factor into the CPI as well and take it back up. So right now, I'm still maintaining my base case. But, you know, I'm not an osteodomist that could that could change, right? If we only had that crystal ball, Sam. The last point that Yashi wrote about in his article here is the third factor. And so if you're looking at this from like a TA perspective, Yashi wanted to highlight the giant ether bear flag. So what is a bear flag? Well, bear flags appear when the price consolidates higher inside of ascending parallel channel after strong move downward. So I'm going to show you exactly what Yashi was talking about here in this article. So this blue ascending channel here is where we've seen the uptick in price with ETH. But now what what Yashi was saying is based on some of the technicals is that this line here, we could potentially see all the way down to $500. Now, this is obviously a worst case scenario. But again, this is another factor from a TA perspective that could come into play here. And we're talking price about ETH. But I want to get back to some of the technicals. How confident are you, you both about this whole merge just going off without a hitch? What's kind of been some of the play by plays with some of the test nets and things like that? And then do you feel really optimistic about the actual technicals behind the merge? Marcel, why don't we start with you? Yeah, I'm going to answer a question with another question. So the thing is, we've seen Vitalik, which is the main leader and founder of ETH on social networks and on interviews, asking the node runners to upgrade to the Bellatrix and then to be ready for the merge and etc. And he's still active, he's still a developer, he's still seen or perceived as a leader. Do you think it is right for a person with that status to still have an active voice telling what the node runners and the decentralized applications should or should not be doing? Do you think it's fair? Remember, Ethereum Foundation still have a stake in Ethereum, Vitalik himself also has coins, so he has vested interest, I don't know, maybe benefiting yourself, benefiting the Ethereum Foundation. So do you think it's right for him to be saying out loud what people should do? I think that brings up a moral quandary, a quagmire, I think is the word I was looking for. Yeah, Sam, do you want to jump in with your thoughts? I mean, any kind of outlook for Ethereum, the roadmap has always been subject to a lot of changes and it became very difficult to take them at face value. It seems like the recent comments by Vitalik, notwithstanding all the issues that Marcel talked about, which is something that I've talked about for years, the issue with Ethereum, but it seems like he's reassured us that we are still planning to go ahead as planned, I think by end of next week. So that, I mean, I'll take them on face value and say that we'll probably go ahead with it. And, you know, there's still going to be a lot of underlying issues with Ethereum on the scalability side, but I think that this is going to push the needle in the right direction, at least for the next few years. But the miners are clearly saying that they don't want, they don't want to be left outside and they're going to build a competing network. So yes, maybe it's the most beneficial change for the users, maybe it's the most beneficial change for the developers, but miners are also an important part of the equation. And when you leave part of the community behind, we've seen that with Bitcoin in the past, it created Bitcoin Cash. Luckily, Bitcoin Cash didn't go ahead or didn't go as planned. But I don't know, I think Ethereum is taking a big risk right now. And I don't think that the Ethereum Foundation or Vital himself should be leading or pointing towards what's the best solution they should leave the decision to the community. That's my opinion. But in any kind of decentralized environment, you're going to get some sort of politicking. And I think like you said, Marcel, Vitalik is kind of seeing after his best interest in what he maybe believes is the best interest to the community at large. Maybe the miners are part of that segment of the community don't agree with it. We're going to find out, I think, how this all plays out and how the miners truly feel about it and how the actual participants are going to react. So next week is a big week just for Ethereum in general. And I see Zamborska saying Vitalik's project from the start, he's the genius. If you want to fork it, go ahead. His leadership has been better than ever. Every other chain out there. So Zamborski, they have a pretty specific thought about what is going to come ahead for Ethereum. I want to bounce into strategy next about how we're going to play the merge. So next article that we have for you is about Bobby Aung, who is the founder of CoinGecko. You're probably familiar with it. Hawking some of your coins on his website. He has specific thoughts about how to approach the merge and what you should be doing. And so again, this isn't financial advice. This is Bobby Aung talking on Twitter. So he believes there's ways for ETH holders to take advantage for the upcoming event. Aung noted that the easiest way to get the fork airdrops is to hold ETH at exchanges that support the forks. However, holding ETH and hardware wallets would also work and could make a trader eligible for all four tokens. To maximize that amount, holders can get. The executive also advised traders to bridge their tokens back to the ETH mainnet, unwrap their wrapped ETH and remove their ETH liquidity from decentralized finance protocols. This is something that Marcel had talked about last week when I had asked him, how are you going to play this? And he gave the perfect advice. Sounds like maybe Bobby Aung took a page out of Marcel's playbook. So are you guys, do you guys align with what Bobby Aung is saying here about the strategy to how to maximize and then what are you all doing with all these four tokens? Are you planning on selling them off immediately? Should you hold on to them? What do you think the best strategy is how to approach this? Why don't we start off with Marcel here first? So what I can remember at Bitcoin fork back in 2017 is that some exchanges prompted to give you the four coins, but took two or three days to deliver and to set up the trading for the new coin. And in those two or three days in the beginning, Bitcoin Cash went over to $4,000 and back to $1,000 and $600. So you've got to be ready, if you want to sell your four coins, you've got to be ready to sell it on the very first day or maybe on the second day. But if you're going to depend or rely on an exchange, giving you the coin and listing the fork, I don't think it's the best solution. I think the better idea is to live on your harder wallet or even on your phone, your hot wallet. So right after the merge, you move them to a new address and from there you move them through the exchange that you want to sell. So I don't think the best solution is leaving the coins on exchange, but I agree with Bobby, you should be selling the four coins and even the fork NFTs that you're going to get for free as well. I have another question, but I'm going to let Sam chime in with his thoughts. Do you agree with Bobby on strategy and what Marcel is saying here? Or is there anything that you would be doing differently to approach this particular situation? Hey, the ETH connoisseurs said it best, and I agree, right? I think that's the best approach. You offload those four coins, maybe make a little bit of money out of thin air, you know? Where does money come from? We create out of thin air. We create some ETH monetary value out of thin air, take it, run, use it to buy more Bitcoin, not investment advice, but that may or may not be what I'm going to be doing in the next week and a half. Parlay everything into Bitcoin. My question is this though, what's the depth of the order books going to be for a lot of these fork coins? Is there going to be liquidity? What's actually backing all these new fork coins when the merge actually happens? Well, I think the miners themselves will be trying to beat, at least to show where there's some value on our new network. Don't sell it. We're trying to build something here. Maybe we're going to grow. We already have the defies and etc., stronger than Ethereum Plastic. We have mining hash power. So they're going to try, they're going to waste some money beating out there to show that their competing network has some value. So I don't think it's going to drop to $0 or $50 or $20 on the very first day. In the question we talked about between, I guess in pre-show here is like, what's going to keep the parity of ETH proof of work versus ETH proof of stake? Could those two be trading at two completely different price ranges or are we expecting them to kind of hold some sort of parity? The pre-fork is already trading on Poloniacs, BitMEX. It's an IOU. It's a derivative. You give your ETH, the whole coin there, but you can trade both separately. So after the merge, if you sold the proof of work coin for $50, they're going to give you those $50. Even if it's worth zero. So it's an IOU. It's a derivative trading. So I think there will be enough volume, but I don't think that everybody will be willing to sell on the very first day because they'll be afraid of, I'm not going to move my coin because I don't know there's the relay protection attack. There's some risks involved. So I'm going to wake a couple of weeks until I decide what to do with my fork coins. So I don't think that liquidity would be an issue. And there's already some pre-trading to give you a rough idea, and it's trading nearly between $50 and $100. Interesting. Well, we're going to see, I guess, what happens. Are we expecting, if you're holding your own coins on your hardware wallet, is that going to be airdropped? Are you going to airdropt immediately versus holding on exchange where they'll potentially give you those new tokens like within a timeframe? Do you know the mechanics of how that will work or so? Yeah, right after the block that the merge is implemented, the new competing blockchain network will be created. And the same balances that you had on Ethereum is going to be replicated. The same balances that you had of stable coins or tokens or wherever will also be replicated. Would there be worth something? I don't know. It depends on how much guys are willing to pay for a crypto punk on the proof-of-work network. Probably bearing nothing, but we'll see. It's automatic. You don't have to do anything. Just leave the coins on your hardware wallet or leave the coins on an exchange that already said it's going to support the fork network. Very good. All right. We have our experts here answering all of our questions. So if you have questions that you're in the chat today, you want to know how to do certain things, what's going on with the merge, we got it for you. Experts here know everything about anything. So Marcel, Sam, thank you for sharing your insights about the upcoming ETH merge. We got to move into our quick crypto tips next. So let's go ahead and jump into that this week. All right. Sometimes, folks, you got to learn how to sidestep, step to the side. And eventually you will read the market incorrectly while finding bottoms or all-coin seasons. Every trader gets it wrong sometimes and there's no need to compensate by immediately increasing the bet size to recoup the losses. That is precisely the opposite of what one should be doing. Whenever you catch a bad break, step aside, take a couple of days, take a deep breath. The psychological impact of loss is a heavy burden will negatively impact your capacity to think clearly. Even when a clear opportunity arises, let that one slide. Don't chase every pump. Go for a walk. Try to organize your life aside from trading. Trading isn't everything, folks. Crypto will always be there. So truly successful traders are not the most gifted, but those who survive the longest, that's very important there. Trading is about surviving each day, small wins, knowing when not to pick your battles and to pick your battles. So again, folks, those are trading or crypto tips for this week. Okay. Now, I know we've been heavily talking about Ethereum, but Marcel's got some even further insights. We're going in a deeper dive into the Ethereum world today. So I hope you folks are ready, Marcel. I'm going to let you take it away here. He's got some interesting stuff to talk about today. Okay, guys. So it looks like the Ethereum merge is happening next week between September 13 and 15. So arguing the pros and cons, I don't think that's a football exercise, firstly, because we don't know how the decentralized applications are going to react if they're going to work as design, if there's going to be some delays. So, but more importantly, the data we're seeing right now is polluted by the free fork expectations and uncertainties of the merge. For instance, the most important metric of derivatives is the futures premium, which is running at a negative 7% analyzed, meaning the contracts expiring year end are trading below the price on regular spot exchanges, such as con base and bit stamped. Usually, that would indicate a very, very bearish stance for investors, but that's not the case right now. Traders bought Ethereum, the coin themselves, on the expectation of the free fork of the pre proof of work coin, and they had it. So they protect it by selling the Ethereum futures contracts. So that's what's causing this distortion on Ethereum futures. So the expectation of the hard fork is distorting every on chain and derivatives indicator. For instance, if investors are removing coins from exchange, this could simply mean that, okay, they want to hold on the cold wallets. So when the fork is set, they can send the coins to a new address from there, move it to the exchange to sell. So I don't think that the on chain indicators and derivative metrics we're seeing right now correctly reflects what's happening on Ethereum. So those are powerful tools important, but they're not going to tell if Ethereum merge is working as planned. But we have some tools for that. I'm going to show you on my article that I sent out yesterday. You need to understand that the beacon chain, which is the chain that Ethereum is going to move to the proof of stake already exists, and it's already working. So there's blocks being produced and validated. They're empty. There's nothing in there, but the blocks are being constructed and we can monitor that. Danilo, can you share my screen, please? So the article is Ethereum gone wrong. Here are the three signs to keep an eye during the merge. Okay. So I'm going to give you three definitive tools to track the merge success. So firstly, you got to know that minor issues are expected and they presented themselves on the three previous test net applications with the latest being go early. So expect minor hiccups that's usual and not something that should be deemed as negative. Developers both from the Ethereum Foundation and the DApps themselves will be ready for eventuality. So the first and important metric or data that we should be tracking are blocks. So we have block explorers working for the beacon chain. One of them is beacon scan by other scan. And the other one is ETH scan, ETH2 by red dot. So these two are working right now and you can visit the sites and you're going to get a screen such as this one. So the blocks should be sent every 12 seconds and the epochs, which mean 32 blocks, will be sent every six and a half minutes. That's how Ethereum 2.0 works. That's not going to change and you can monitor the beacon change right now on these two block explorers and you have the link on the article. So blocks should be sent every 12 seconds and epochs every six and a half minutes. So that's the first data you should be monitoring to understand if the Ethereum 2.0, the merge is working as expected. The second one is Infura API. So what is Infura? Infura is a backbone, is an infrastructure for the decentralized applications so they don't have to run their own full nodes. And almost every decentralized application on Ethereum relies on Infura, which is owned by Consensus, which is a strong partner of Ethereum, co-founded by Joseph Lubin, which is also a partner of Vitalik. So Uniswap, Compound, Maker, Decentraland, and even the Wallet Metamask relies on the API, which is the data connectivity with Infura. So on their website you can check on status page and you can see if it's operational the link of the Ethereum 1.0, the old one, and the 2.0 API if it's fully operational. So that's on the status page and you have the link here in the article so you can track if Infura is working as planet. So the third data that you should be monitoring even ahead of the merge is slashing. So what exactly is slashing? So to become an Ethereum 2.0 validator you got to deposit 32 ETH coins and run the software. Of course you can delegate it, your coins to another validator, but if this validator is faulty, if his connection goes down or he's trying to attack the network, he's going to get a slash, which means a penalty. So slashing is not something necessarily bad, but if there's a lot of slashing happening to different validators, there's maybe an error on the software or some data center or data software provider they're using, hosting, has gone down, so you're going to see a lot of slashing happening. So if this happens, if lots of validators gets a slash or gets a penalty, this could be a yellow flag or something that was unexpected on the software compatibility. So those, thank you, Danilo. So those are the three tools that every investor, even those that don't have their own node or don't know how to use it, should be monitored. So Infura API, the slashing and the block production itself. Two minutes, not to be confused with two minutes, slashing penalty for Lahaki reference there for all you hockey fans out there. I'll say I might appreciate that. All right, I got a legit question, Marcel. I feel like something that hasn't really been talked about is the L2s and the impact of the merge. Is there any impact whatsoever on the L2s, the polygons, any of the L2s out there, optimism, arbitration, etc., etc. What's the impact for the L2s? Are they going to have to be updating as well or what does that kind of landscape look like? Well, every decentralized application is going to have to upgrade. But as I explained, the Bitcoin chain already exists. So they can already try and test if they're getting the message and the blocks from this new chain. So it shouldn't be a surprise for them. They have been able to test. It's already working. It's not a test net. It's fully operational, the Bitcoin chain. So yes, there could be some hiccups. But in terms of use for the average user, if you have a metamask wallet or if you're using a decentralized application on optimism or on other layer two solutions, there's nothing new need to do to after the merge. So basically, I don't think for the end user, anything's going to change. Okay. You heard it first, folks. Marcel, thank you for giving the in-depth analysis of what's going to happen with the e-thmerge. I think everyone's got a question. We got all the answers, folks. This is what we got Marcel and Sam here on the show. If you have questions, make sure you pop them in the chat. But next thing's next, we're going to move into markets pro this week. We had two coins. You should have been watching on our platform. So let's go ahead and get into our markets pro segment for this week. All right. Well, we were watching Light of this week and it was trading on their ticker LDO. What happened? Well, a newsquake happened and those are automated alerts that instantly notify users when market moving events happened. LDO had an excellent week seeing significant price movement after strings of both strong cortex scores and newsquakes. Green scores flashed at the start of the week. Well, I said it was trading right around a dollar and 59 cents. And over several days, the price climbed to a peak of $2.27. That's a 42.8% increase. This sent in price corresponded with several announcements about new staking opportunities such as introduction to liquid staking on Terra and Solana. Newsquakes that are alerted markets pro subscribers to these developments were followed by a price increase of 31.9%. So this was a double whammy. You had the vortex score and you had the newsquake and you got the double dip. So you had a 42% gain. Then you had a 30% gain. That's why you got to get markets pro folks. If you haven't checked out markets pro on coin telegraph, this is the trading platform that's going to give you the best insights in the game. All right. The next token that we're watching this week was FIRO trading under the ticker FIRO. Now what happened this week? Well, the vortex score lit up like a Christmas tree. And a vortex score is a comparison between its current market and social conditions of those in the past. A score of 80 or above is considered roughly bullish. Conversely, a low score between 30 indicates historically bearish conditions. Well, FIRO saw the late effects of historical significant market conditions at the end of this week. On August 30th, an 85 vortex score lit up and held over 24 hours, but resulted in only mild price movement the following few days. Despite this initial week performance, blew up at the end of the week for a massive gain. Those who bought and held from the local low of $2.25 to the weekly high of $2.67 would have seen an 18% return. Make sure you give our markets pro platform a go. These two trades could have been two trades that you made out like a bandit on. And folks, that was our markets pro segment for this week. Quick shout out to our store, store.cointelegraph.com. We have all the swag for you, all your crypto needs, holidays are coming up, you know, you gotta be months ahead. So when you were thinking about your loved ones and your family and your friends, you got to go to the store, get all your crypto swag that you ever wish for. So guys, great show today. And I have one last question from Bart here in the chat. It says maybe a stupid question, but are all ERC tokens, will they just move to ETH 2.0? I think we touched on this earlier, but Marcel, do you have a quick answer for Bart here in chat? Yeah, every token ERC 20 receipts, 721, etc. It's going to be replicated on the proof of work network. If they're going to have any value, likely not, but yes, they're going to be replicated. So that's one of the causes you should not be leaving your coins at the exchange because the exchange is not going to give you the free NFT. Exactly right. All right, guys, closing thoughts for this week. Let's start off with Sam. What kind of life advice closing thoughts you have for our audience today? Don't sell the bottom, not financial advice. If you didn't sell the top, don't sell the bottom, guys, please. Let's kind of be real here. We're in a pretty ugly period in the markets right now due to all the factors that we talked about today and on past shows. You're probably going to see a lot of that come to fruition even more the next month or two. So if you have investments and you don't need to cash out, it's probably best that you don't. Again, not financial advice, but you don't want to be that guy or that girl who sells the bottom. I'm just saying. The next few months could create a lot of fear in the market and might ignite some people to do that. So stay composed. Remember your investment horizon and rebalance if you have to rebalance, but overall, lots of opportunity in crypto and in Bitcoin. It's going to take time to get back to where we were a year ago. Excellent insights there. All right, Marcel, any closing thoughts for us this week? So Benton, I saw, I think it was Reddit or Twitter post today. It's from a Bitcoin talk, a forum from 2011. A guy said, I just minded 600 Bitcoins, but I think I'm too late in the game. So I guess I'm going to need to buy some coins from you guys over the next weeks. So the point here is we always think that we missed the boat. Oh, the boom in the price already happened. Oh, if I started mining a year earlier, I would have much more coins. Oh, I missed the dip to 70,000. It's never going to dip that price again. Dude, five years later, it doesn't matter if you bought the deep at 70,000. It matters if you bought Bitcoin over time or not. If you like Ethereum, if you're buying at 1.6,000 or 1.5,000, it's not going to make a difference in four or five years time. So everybody thinks they're too late to the game and they missed it. It's not true. Excellent points. And yet you always see some of those posts floating around Twitter where it's like, damn, sold my Bitcoin at $100. It's things like that. I think it's like, if you could just afford to sit on your crypto, not look at it for the next year or two, things are going to look pretty good for you in the long run. So again, that's why we're here for you. Marcel and Sam have such great perspectives on the macro and zooming out, keeping things positive for the long run, because that's why we're here. We are believers in the technology and we're believers in the long run of what blockchain and crypto can do for you. So folks, thank you for tuning in today. We're here on Tuesdays at 12 p.m. Eastern. Make sure you smash the notification button and subscribe to our channel so you don't miss an episode. You want some of the expert insights we got them for you here on the Marker Report. Until next week, we will see you over and out.