Method :

1. Using ethereum.core tables to determine transactions count and volumes.

2. Liquid Staking contracts collected from defillama.com

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Analyzed time period: A month before Merge until now

31.Overview:

Using the opposite charts , we can get an overview of the Ethereum ecosystem before and after the merge.

since Merge is an infrastructural improvement in Ethereum, should it cause changes in user behavior?

1. Transaction Count : (decreased)

   The number of transactions made by users has been stable at the border of 1 million transactions per day before the merge, after the merge we have seen a short-term increase, which has returned to the previous situation after 3 days.

2. Average ETH value of Transactions : (no change)

   The average ETH value of transactions increased significantly before and a few days after the merge, but returned to the average of a month ago over time

3. Average Transaction Fee : (decreased)

   As expected, Merge has resulted in a slight reduction in transaction fees.

4. Ethereum Price: (decreased)

It was expected that the price of Ethereum would increase with the merge, regardless of the market downtrend, but the optimism didn't last long and the merge failed to create an uptrend for the price of Ethereum.

1. Are users more willing to buy ETH?

It seems that users have not been very willing to buy or swap their holdings to ETH after the merge (September 15th).

from the ETH Swap Stats chart, it can be concluded that the amount of ETH sales after the Merge has increased both in volume and in the number of sellers.

The ratio of ETH buying volume to selling volume was mostly positive in the days and weeks before the Merge, but on the day of the merge (September 15) the selling ratio was 21% higher than the buying ratio, and on September 18th the ratio reached 31% that unprecedented in the past month, probably a large part of this sell volume was related to the price drop in the market, however, the optimism about Merge could not reduce the sales pressure.

2.Analysis:

Conclusions :

1. it can be concluded that the effect of Merge on the Ethereum ecosystem was temporary and caused optimism and hype among users, which lost its effect over time and we saw user activity return to pre-merge levels.

2. Optimism about Merge failed to reduce the selling pressure of Ethereum during the market crash

3. The occurrence of Merge could not increase the number of user transactions.

4. With the occurrence of Merge, the volume of Ethereum Liquid Stacking has increased.

5. Users have withdrawn a large amount of Ethereum from the exchanges as the Merge is approaching.

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2. How was the activity of users in the protocols before and after Merge.

   
   Comparing the activity of users one week before and one week after the occurrence of Merge shows that there has been a significant decrease in most of the activities.

Introduction :

The Merge is a planned Ethereum network upgrade that removes the proof of work consensus layer and merges the Beacon Chain’s proof of stake network into the current Ethereum mainnet.

Ethereum’s consensus mechanism is a contribution to the network following Eth1. Eth1 was known as the execution layer. This will soon be deprecated as we migrate towards Eth2, now renamed The Merge.

Primarily The Merge will focus on the execution of upgrading the consensus mechanism and  bringing it in line with its original mission: to migrate from proof of work to proof of stake, validate transactions on the blockchain, and add new blocks.[source]

3. Have users become more interested in Ethereum liquid staking after Merge?

As the opposite chart shows, the volume of Ethereum liquid stakes increased significantly after the merge.

before the merge, the daily volume was often below 2K Ethereum per day, but after the merge, the volume reached more than 3K Ethereum per day.

4. is there a trend in the Volume of Deposit and Withdrawn Ethereum from/to CEX?

It seems that a day before and a few days after the merge, the volume of deposits and withdrawals from/to exchanges increased compared to the previous days, but over time decreased to the average of the previous days.