Here’s Who Is Buying Bitcoin As It Jumps $41K; Ethereum Proposes a Near-Future Hard Fork To Curb Gas Fees

Bitcoin (BTC) tapped intraday highs of $41,970 on Feb. 5, after a surprise recovery took the largest cryptocurrency to two-week highs. At the time of publication, BTC was exchanging hands at $41,605 while Ethereum was trading at $3,007.

On-chain analytics, Santiment notes traders’ optimism as Bitcoin price recovered. It says ” Bitcoin has leapt back to the $40k’s on Friday in tandem with equities markets surging. With this upswing, traders’ positive vs. negative commentary has blasted off to its highest ratio since late October, as $BTC maximalists are chiming in”

Courtesy: Santiment

The recent crypto market meltdown drove investor enthusiasm toward the two largest crypto assets by market cap, Bitcoin and Ethereum according to a new survey conducted by digital asset manager CoinShares. CoinShares notes that investor sentiment for Bitcoin (BTC) and (ETH) have improved since Dec. 2021, this has led to buy-ins for the lead assets.

Here’s Who Is Buying Bitcoin

According to a new financial disclosure with the U.S. Senate, Sen. Ted Cruz bought Bitcoin during its dip in January. The Texas Republican bought between $15,001 to $50,000 worth on Jan. 25, according to the disclosure. He used the brokerage River to make the transaction. At the time of the acquisition, Bitcoin was trading around $36,000 and $37,000.

MicroStrategy, one of the largest institutional investors of Bitcoin, also disclosed that it had purchased more Bitcoin in January. According to an official form with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed on Tuesday, MicroStrategy purchased 660 BTC between December 30, 2021, and January 31, 2022, for “approximately $25 million” in cash.

IntoTheBlock analytics notes that the buying pressure for Bitcoin is now coming from medium and long-term holders who have been accumulating at recent prices, as short-term holders capitulate.

Ethereum Proposes a Near-Future Hard Fork To Curb Gas Fees

Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin speaks of some proposals to add “blob-carrying transactions” in a near-future hard fork, bringing higher scalability to rollups before full sharding is complete.

Transaction fees on Ethereum L1 have been quite high for months, according to a recent Ethereum note shared by Ethereum developer Tim Beiko, and there is a greater urgency to do whatever it takes to promote an ecosystem-wide migration to rollups.

In the near and medium-term, and possibly in the long term, rollups are regarded to be Ethereum’s only trustless scaling solution. Although rollups dramatically reduce fees for many Ethereum users, this pricing may appear expensive to the ordinary ETH user.

Buterin says that plans for a near-future hard fork to introduce “blob-carrying transactions” that would improve rollup scalability are already in the works. By implementing the transaction format that would be used in sharding but not actually sharding those transactions, this EIP would provide a stop-gap solution until the moment at which the transaction format would be utilized in sharding.

This gives rollups temporary scaling relief by allowing them to scale up to 2 MB per slot, while a separate fee market keeps prices low while usage is limited.

According to a paper published by JP Morgan strategists in early January, the last step of sharding, which is necessary for scaling the Ethereum network, may not happen until 2023.

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