The successful Shapella upgrade on Ethereum has spurred ether and other alternative cryptocurrencies to rally, fueling the "alt season" narrative on Crypto Twitter. Ether has gained over 10% in the past 24 hours, reaching 11-month highs of over $2,120 during Asian trading hours. The Shapella upgrade marked a significant development for the Ethereum network, allowing users to stake and unstake tokens at their discretion and enhancing the network's overall prospects.
Governance tokens of liquid staking protocols experienced substantial gains, with Lido's LDO and Rocket Pool's RPL surging up to 14%. Both protocols lock billions of dollars to provide ether staking yields to users, who can stake any amount of ether to earn rewards while maintaining the liquidity of locked coins through derivative tokens and without needing the 32 ether required to run a validator node.
Lido's staked ether tokens (STETH) entered the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, reaching $12 billion, which is the amount of ether locked on the protocol. Valerie Tetu, Head of Strategy at Lido Finance, informed CoinDesk that the Shappella upgrade likely boosted user confidence.
Tetu stated via email that "staking withdrawals enabled by the Shanghai upgrade represent a significant milestone in the development of the Ethereum blockchain." She added that "withdrawals will allow stakers to participate in securing the network with more confidence while increasing the capital efficiency of the tokens they decide to allocate."
Dogecoin (DOGE) also experienced gains for the second consecutive day. Much of this growth can be attributed to trading service eToro's announcement that it would offer crypto trading directly from Twitter, which Elon Musk owns. This likely fueled speculation that Dogecoin could eventually be adopted for payments on the platform. Musk is a vocal Dogecoin supporter and has previously expressed support for the Dogecoin network's development.
Additionally, Cardano (ADA) saw a nearly 9% increase due to fundamental growth in the Cardano network, such as broader support for decentralized application (dApp) development.
Some market analysts predict the rally will continue for the next few weeks. Ilya Volkov, co-founder of crypto services platform YouHodler, told CoinDesk in an email that "many traders had been waiting for the end of the upgrade to start long position accumulation." He added that "if the macro situation does not get worse, it's unlikely the current trend will change in the near future, despite the fact that selling pressure is going to increase in the following weeks due to unlocking liquidity."
