The crypto markets gained 1.6% over the weekend, bringing global market capitalisation up to US$1.16tn.
Ethereum surged above US$2,000 before edging back to US$1,930 on Monday morning.
Buyers piled in on strong signals from founder Vitalik Buterin that September 15 marks the specific date of the hotly anticipated Merge protocol upgrade.
The terminal total difficulty has been set to 58750000000000000000000.
This means the ethereum PoW network now has a (roughly) fixed number of hashes left to mine.https://t.co/3um744WkxZ predicts the merge will happen around Sep 15, though the exact date depends on hashrate. pic.twitter.com/9YnloTWSi1
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 12, 2022
Bitcoin also fared well over the weekend, rising 2% come Monday morning.
Meme coin and 12th largest cryptocurrency Shiba Inu is on a roll, surging 7.8% in the past 24 hours, while its dog-themed competitor Dogecoin headed above the US$10bn point with a 1% increase.
Move-to-earn (M2E) NFT project Stepn was another strong riser this morning, adding 3.5% to its now US$624mln market capitalisation.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) projects are looking less bullish, with Curve, Convex Finance, Uniswap, Synthetix and 1inch all down between 5-10%.
Most blockchain networks have also suffered a bit of a dip in market valuation.
In the news
Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon has conducted his first interview since the US$45bn collapse of LUNA and the TerraUSD stablecoin caused unprecedented turmoil in the crypto sector.
Unfortunately only paid members of Coinage Media will be given access to the interview with Zack Guzmán.
Guzmán was a longtime Terra proponent, while Coinage Media has disclosed that its parent company previously received funding from Terraform Labs.