Tuesday's Bellatrix upgrade on the Beacon Chain was a success, setting the stage for the next and final step in Ethereum's transition to Proof-of-Stake validation. The next milestone will be the Paris upgrade, which is predicted to happen late in the evening on Wednesday, September 14.

Read more about the Merge from Cryptal CEO Khvicha Kopinadze

The US Whitehouse released a report on climate change and crypto this week, addressing four important questions that were raised in President Biden's executive order from March, Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets. The position of the US appears to be not entirely hostile to bitcoin and digital assets, pointing out that the US contribution to global bitcoin mining rose from 4.5% to 37.8% between January 2020 and January 2022. However, the report places responsibility on miners in particular to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. The report also indicated that blockchain technology could potentially play a role in climate monitoring and damage mitigation through distributed energy resource coordination and broader supply chain management applications. Noting that the US government's priority is to solve the climate crisis while ensuring energy reliability, the report recommends collecting more data on power consumption by the crypto mining industry, and taking action "to limit or eliminate the use of high-energy consensus mechanisms for crypto-asset mining" if other measures are not effective at reducing climate changing emissions to net-zero by 2050.

Read the full report here

Friday, September 9, saw global crypto market capitalization pop over the $1 trillion mark again, a more than 5.6% increase over the previous 24 hours. While this indicator has been bobbing around 1 trillion for the last month, the latest spike was one of its larger one-day jumps in the last few months. The global crypto market cap started this year at $2.2 trillion but hasn't made it back above the 2 trillion mark since early April. Its lowest point this year was just over $800 billion in mid-June.

via CoinMarketCap

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