The price of Bitcoin has surged to a one-month high, crossing the $46,000 mark, buoyed by consistent investments into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) amid an increasing focus on the upcoming halving event in April.

Banking giant JPMorgan has recently surveyed over 4,000 institutional traders, and found that 78% of them indicated no plans to trade digital assets within the next five years.

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade has been scheduled to launch on its mainnet on March 13. The upgrade includes the introduction of proto-danksharding and blobs, aiming to significantly reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks.

Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Bitcoin Price Reaches One-Month High as Investors Eye Halving Event
• JPMorgan Survey Finds Most Institutional Traders Are Not Interested in Crypto
• Ethereum’s Dencun Mainnet Upgrade Set to Launch on March 13
• Crypto Market Movers – ENS, CTSI, FLR

Bitcoin Price Reaches One-Month High as Investors Eye Halving Event

The price of Bitcoin has surged to a one-month high, crossing the $46,000 mark, buoyed by consistent investments into spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) amid an increasing focus on the upcoming halving event in April.

To date spot Bitcoin ETFs have attracted a net $8 billion, while an initial $6 billion outflow from Grayscale’s Bitcoin fund, which was converted into an ETF, has begun to slow down.

Bitcoin’s halving event, which occurs approximately every four years, will reduce the reward that miners receive for mining a block, from 6.25 to 3.125 Bitcoin. This mechanism is integral to Bitcoin's design, ensuring the total supply does not exceed 21 million tokens.

Historically, halving events have led to significant bull markets for Bitcoin. Analysts, including DBS Bank's Chief Economist Taimur Baig, argue that the reduction in mining rewards necessitates an increase in Bitcoin's price to ensure mining remains economically viable. This adjustment prevents a decrease in mining activity, which is crucial for the network's security and functionality.

JPMorgan Survey Finds Most Institutional Traders Are Not Interested in Crypto

Banking giant JPMorgan has recently surveyed over 4,000 institutional traders, and found that 78% of them indicated no plans to trade digital assets within the next five years.

The bank’s e-Trading annual survey also revealed a small group of institutional traders see blockchain technology as the most influential in shaping the future of trading, while showing a sit in focus towards artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, with 61% of respondents viewing these technologies as the most impactful on trading in the coming three years.

AI and machine learning have been gaining steam, with just 25% of respondents pointing to these as the most impactful technologies two years ago, while blockchain technology dropped from 25% of respondents in 2022 to just 7% this year.

The declining interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency trading aligns with the cooling off of the digital currency market following the 2021 bull run, which led to a challenging period for the industry characterized by bankruptcies and market downturns.

Despite these results, there has been a slight uptick in engagement within the sector, with 9% of surveyed traders currently involved in cryptocurrency, up from 8% last year, while 12% of respondents revealed they plan on trading crypto within the next five years.

Ethereum’s Dencun Mainnet Upgrade Set to Launch on March 13

Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade has been scheduled to launch on its mainnet on March 13. The upgrade includes the introduction of proto-danksharding and blobs, aiming to significantly reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks.

The hard fork has been scheduled for 13:55:35 UTC, which equates to approximately slot 8626176 on the Ethereum network. The upgrade was decided during an all-core developers consensus layer call, just a day after Dencun was successfully implemented on the Holesky testnet.

The Holesky implementation was the third of three test networks that occurred without any hiccups. Through Dencun, the network will introduce proto-danksharding and implement “blob-carrying transactions” to allow layer-2 networks to use more Ethereum block space.

Blob-carrying transactions are akin to standard ones, but include an additional data component. The upgrade will limit the number of blobs per block to 16, with each having a size cap of 128 KB, collectively adding around 2 megabytes of block space.

This expansion in block space is a boon for both optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, enabling them to post transaction data commitments on-chain while storing the actual data in data blobs rather than call data. This mechanism is expected to streamline transactions and reduce costs.

Crypto Market Movers – ENS, CTSI, FLR

Several tokens are leading the charge in the last 7-day period. Some of these are well-known cryptocurrencies with more liquid trading pairs, so we’ll be focusing on these over low-cap cryptos that may have higher percentage changes.

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) - Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. It was created by the Ethereum Foundation and developed with the help of a community of developers.

Flare (FLR) - Flare is a layer 1 network that centers on blockchain interoperability—the ability for different blockchains to communicate with one another. It is designed to bring smart contract capabilities to other blockchain projects that lack them, such as the XRP Ledger.

Cartesi (CTSI) - Cartesi (CTSI) is a utility token native to the Cartesi platform, an innovative layer-2 infrastructure that aims to address the issues of scalability and high costs in blockchain development. Launched in 2018, the project brings mainstream programming tools, libraries, and services to the world of decentralized applications (DApps).

State of the Crypto by Top Tier Exchange Volume

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