With much anticipation we all awaits one of the biggest upgrade on ethereum blockchain, the last successful merge upgrade was last September which took the crypto space by surprise where ethereum finally became power efficient by switching to Proof of stake (PoS) from its excessive use of power Proof of work (PoW).
The Shanghai upgrade
Shanghai upgrade; would complete ethereum Proof of stake protocol by allowing validators to unstake/withdraw their ethereum profit which was locked for years, over $34 billion worth of ethereum will be unlocked after the upgrade, allowing those who successfully locked up 32 eth to be accessible for withdrawal.
There were lots of sentiment by youtubers and crypto analysts on what might likely happen once the Shanghai upgrade kick start, a major concern was ethereum locked up since December 2020 will be in circulation which will probably lead to massive market dump from stakers/validators according to some reports if those ethereum are unstake and immediately sold ethereum market capitalization will crumble leaving its second position in the market cap to either fifth position.
Well the crypto space is filled with surprises, ethereum did beat our expectations and did well after the upgrade, nothing much can be speculated at the moment could this be a quick market pump before a long dump to take out the weak hands that bet against the upgrade or will the rally continue and ethereum maintains it's market cap position.
Shanghai aftermath
At the time of writing this post data from coinmarketcap shows ethereum trading over 10% on 24h timeframe with a total market cap of over $250 billion and a trading volume of over $16 billion at the price of $2,100 per ETH.
Data from Coinglass shows $62 million have been liquidated from bearish traders that bet against ethereum over the past 24h.
Analysis shows there would be selling pressure once the upgrade enables validators to withdraw their lock ethereum I guess we are seeing quite the opposite.
data pulled from Nansen indicates, many validators have indeed made their exit, taking with them their staked Ethereum and rewards as they leave. Over the past 24 hours, there has been a net exit of more than 84,500 ETH.
Source
These validators indeed have exit staking their ethereum but have not make any move of selling their holding at the moment which shows they are still holding on to see if the bull rally will continue and ethereum making another all time high record. Ethereum looks very promising those who understand the crypto space will continue to hold if possible still stake to accumulate more rewards.