Ethereum is taking a hard hit from the crypto market beat down.
CoinMarketCap says Ethereum is currently trading at $1,770, down roughly 3.4% over the past 24 hours.
The bearish trend is the latest in what has been a rather red week for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Over the past seven days, Ethereum shed more than 16% of its value, tumbling from $2,077 on Monday to as low as $1,731 in the early hours on Friday.
This drastic price shift also led to over $157.26 million in Ethereum liquidations.
The asset’s price action has been linked it’s incoming merge event slated for August.
The merge will see the current proof-of-work (PoW) version of Ethereum merge with its proof-of-stake (PoS) counterpart. This counterpart is technically called the Beacon Chain and has been in operation since December 2020.
Once complete, the PoW-based version will end, effectively making Ethereum a PoS blockchain network, bringing with it a host of new benefits.
On Wednesday, however, the Beacon Chain, a sort of ghost version of Ethereum running in parallel to the current Ethereum, experienced a block reorganization event. Such an event means that for a brief moment the Beacon Chain had been forked, and blocks of transactions were being processed on yet another parallel version of the Beacon Chain.
