]

The cryptocurrency ether runs on the Ethereum network. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Ethereum developers have defended the changes to the network that will come in the summer.

They said the alterations are very popular with users, as they make fees simpler and limit ether supply.

But miners remain disgruntled that their fees will be cut, with debate in the community ongoing.

Sign up here for our daily newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell.

Developers on the Ethereum network have defended major changes that are set for the summer that will destroy ether tokens and cut the fees paid to miners, saying they’re popular with users and could boost the cryptocurrency’s price.

The planned alteration to the network, known in crypto jargon as EIP-1559, “is very popular among Ethereum users as it potentially makes Ethereum a deflationary asset,” Ben Edgington, a developer at ConsenSys, a company closely involved in the network, said on Tuesday.

Ethereum developers approved significant changes to the network that runs the ether cryptocurrency earlier in March. They are set to overhaul the current system under which users send tokens to miners to pay for transactions to be completed in a kind of auction process.

The changes have sparked anger among miners, however, as they would reduce the fees they receive. Some have even proposed a form of strike.

Yet developers say users support the changes, partly because the reduction in coins could lead to the price of ether rising sharply. Ether traded at around $1,800 on Wednesday. The token has gained around 145% so far this year.

Dan Finlay, lead developer on popular Ethereum wallet MetaMask, said: “Its purpose is to provide a more predictable transaction pricing system that reduces overpayment, and has some deflationary economics as a side benefit.”

Under the changes, which will likely come into force in July, users will send a base transaction fee to the network that would then destroy or “burn” ether tokens, thereby reducing the number of coins in circulation.

It will move the system away from the current mechanism, in which users have to bid to have their transactions included in blocks by miners, which can make fees very costly at times.

Edgington said these issues are “a significant problem for the usability of Ethereum and a barrier to the broader adoption of Ethereum by non-specialists.”

Lex Sokolin, co-head of fintech at ConsenSys, said the changes will take the network fees “from having an unpredictable and unbounded pricing mechanism to something that is much more predictable.”

The anonymous founder of Pylon, a major North American ether miner, said there was a lot of “turmoil” in the Ethereum world. They said miners had spent time and money building facilities, and now could be faced with heavy losses due to the changes.

“It goes back to the point [that] developers don’t mine, so they could care less about a miner, and miners don’t develop, so they could care less about reducing the congestion,” they said.

Some ether miners threatened to effectively go on strike, or try to disrupt the system in other ways in protest at the changes.

But there are signs of peace breaking out, with miners proposing their own EIP - which stands for Ethereum improvement proposal - that would raise their rewards and gradually lower them.

Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. (ETH), Visa Inc. (V) - Why Is Ethereum Surging, Outperforming Bitcoin Today?

]

Gains in Bitcoin (BTC) appear faint in comparison with Ethereum (ETH) as the latter’s supply diminishes.

What Happened: BTC traded 0.13% at $59,285.22 over 24 hours at press time while ETH was up 4.08% at $1,925.03.

Over a seven-day trailing period, ETH has surged 21.92%, while BTC has moved up 12.77%.

CryptoQuant data indicates ETH reserves held in all wallets fell to 19.53 million as of March 31 as prices soared over $1,921.

ETH Held In All Exchange Wallets — Data From CryptoQuant.com

On Wednesday, OpenSea, a non-fungible token marketplace said it would add support for trading through Immutable X, a decentralized protocol built on Ethereum, which it said would enable zero gas fee.

Immutable X is coming to OpenSea! We’re excited to announce OpenSea will soon support the trading of NFTs on their gas-free layer-2 protocol, built directly on Ethereum. #Immutable #OpenSea pic.twitter.com/B3Y5j7Lfue — OpenSea (@opensea) March 31, 2021

Why It Matters: BTC has been losing its dominance as the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization of late. This week the dominance fell to its lowest since October last year.

At press time, BTC had a 56.6% dominance, while ETH had 11.7%, according to CoinMarketCap data.

On Monday, Visa Inc (NYSE:V) announced a pilot to allow transactions to be settled through USD Coin (USDC) on its network.

Reacting to the development, analyst Michaël van de Poppe said on Twitter that Ethereum was “going to surprise everyone massively."

He had previously predicted a $10,000 price level for ETH.

© 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

3 Reasons Ethereum Is About to Skyrocket

]

Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) – Nearly three dozen scientists vetted by the World Health Organization and the Chinese government gathered in Wuhan, China, early this winter to start the arduous task of finding the origins of Covid-19 and determining how it spread like wildfire around the world.Six weeks after that trip, the working group this week delivered an analysis that laid out four possible scenarios and recommended next steps for digging deeper to find the pandemic’s genesis. The 123-page report, and a nearly 200-page supplement, was immediately engulfed by criticism, with a dozen nations including the U.S., the U.K. and Japan questioning its structure and insights.The most unexpected detractor was WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who helped negotiate the details of the trip and agreed to the scope of the work back in July. He said the theory that the virus escaped via a laboratory accident needed to be more thoroughly vetted, a hypothesis that has been vigorously denied by the Chinese government.“There’s obviously a lot of politics,” said John Mackenzie, an Australian virologist who led a 2003 WHO-convened mission in China to study the origins of SARS, leaving him well-versed on the delicacies of undertaking such a study. “He should be standing by his committee’s report.”“I just find it very strange that he’s demeaning it and he’s deflecting from it,” said Mackenzie, an emeritus professor at Curtain University in Perth who serves on the WHO’s emergency committee for Covid-19.It’s not that controversy was unexpected: the mission was fraught from the start, with China resisting the scientists for months before relenting to a team of experts that comprised of a local expert for every foreign one. Still, the furore now threatens to undermine scientific progress in understanding how the coronavirus came about, and the chance of WHO-led further investigation in both China and other countries – which the experts have always said is needed – is growing faint.“Multiple attacks daily, demonstrably false, but gullible followers believe them,” said Peter Daszak, a New York-based zoologist who was part of the international team of scientists, in a Twitter post on what he described as “right-wing media outlets”. “Real issue is that this undermines science and ironically puts U.S. citizens at risk by leading us into rabbit hole conspiracies instead of better understanding of how to prevent pandemics.”Complex ProcessThe WHO experts, who traveled to China in January after months of negotiations, were presented with reports from local researchers, rather than being allowed to conduct their own analysis, some said in media interviews after the trip. They also didn’t have unfettered access to raw material or the lab in Wuhan that has become central to the controversy. Instead, they were required to work within the parameters negotiated by the Chinese government and the WHO more than six months before the mission began.Their official report, itself delayed for weeks, was questioned even before its official release. The U.S. has “real concerns about the methodology and the process” of the report, including that the Chinese government “apparently helped to write it,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN on Sunday, ahead of publication.On Tuesday, hours after it was published, a joint statement from 14 countries including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Japan, South Korea and Norway, bemoaned a lack of access to “complete, original data and samples.” Scientists from five of the countries took part in the mission.China dismissed the criticism as not “serious or responsible” on Wednesday. “They want to spread rumors and push their hidden political agenda,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman​ Hua Chunying at a briefing in Beijing. “The experts have said they went to places they wanted to, and they met with people they wanted to.”The WHO should take the lead in respecting the conclusion of scientists, she said. Some among the WHO expert team, made up of virologists, epidemiologists and other public health experts, argued that not many countries would allow unfettered access to confidential data, and noted that their work seemed to be taken out of context. At the heart of the controversy appears to be a mismatch between the slow speed and cautious precision of scientific work, and the political symbolism thrust on the origins investigation.Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who was a member of the WHO team, mused on Twitter about whether other countries would allow outsiders to conduct a similar investigation.While much of the criticism has focused on the report’s dismissal of the laboratory leak theory, the scope of study included no mention of research specifically on labs in Wuhan, or any role they may have played.A true audit of the lab is a “much more complex process, and that’s not what we were there to do,” said Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist based in Sydney who was part of the team.The lab leak theory took off when it was promoted by the Trump administration. There has been nothing to suggest it emerged from a lab in China or anywhere else, Ben Embarek said.Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid, defended the report, saying the epidemiology and molecular data from 2019 is the most comprehensive she has seen, while the animal section provides details on the species that were sampled.“We were able to create a space for the science,” said Ben Embarek. “We were never pressured to remove critical elements from our report. Personally, I am very proud of this report and, like my other colleagues, we all stand behind it on both sides, despite all the interest and the pressure and the immense difficult environments we have faced over the past few months.”(Updates with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman comments in 12th paragraph. An earlier version corrected the identity of an expert who posted on Twitter.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.