Weekly Flip Thru: Ethereum gets an upgrade & DOGE gets a Twitter-fueled pump
News flash, crypto fans! There’s altcoin action to discuss and blockchain bounties to dissect in crypto news for the week of April 10, 2023. Is there a world in which crypto and Twitter aren’t so inextricably tied? Maybe, but that’s not the world we live in. In this edition of the Weekly Flip Thru we’re going to look at an exciting update for the Ethereum network and the ways in which Twitter still holds weight over the crypto narrative.
Here’s the top crypto news as we head into the week.
The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade
“What the fork?!” is what Eleanor of the TV series ‘The Good Place’ might have to say about the upcoming hard fork on the Ethereum blockchain network. This latest upgrade is indeed a hard fork – meaning there’s no going back to the old version of the network – and has been dubbed the Shanghai upgrade.
It’s an anticipated change and part of a series of upgrades that will improve performance on the Ethereum network after it underwent a major facelift in the fall of 2022. That’s when Ethereum switched over from a proof of work (think: many high-powered computers crunching cryptographic equations to get the solution and be rewarded with blockchain bonuses) to an eco-friendly proof of stake consensus mechanism (in a nutshell, putting up your own crypto as collateral so you can sign off on blockchain transactions).
Since adopting the proof of stake consensus mechanism, the carbon footprint of the Ethereum network is way down. And investors hope the latest upgrade to the network will translate to prices that are way up. Transaction volume on ETH in the run-up to the proof of stake merge was significant; time will tell if recent price gains for ETH will hold steady or trend upward following the Shanghai upgrade.
Dogecoin Twitter logo stunt
Chief Tweeter himself Elon Musk was hot dogging a little bit last week (but then again, when isn’t he?). The owner of the social media platform raised eyebrows (and DOGE prices) with a stunt that briefly replaced Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo with dogecoin’s heavily meme’d mascot.
The Shiba Inu had a short-lived reign as the face of Twitter, only making it through part of the week before the blue bird was back on its perch. But that was long enough for crypto investors and market watchers to speculate about Musk following through on a proposed plan to make dogecoin the de facto payment method for transactions over Twitter – a long-rumored feature of the social network that hasn’t materialized in any way shape or form … yet.
Dogecoin prices hit the $0.10 mark, a 5-month high. However, after Twitter reinstated its original logo and shooed the DOGE mascot as one might “shoo” a presumptive pup off the couch, the price of DOGE dipped more than 8% before the week ended.
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