At press time, the price of Ethereum (ETH) was at $1,552, down 5% from yesterday and 6% from one week ago. The fall coincided with a market-wide selloff brought on by Kraken’s agreement to stop providing any staking services to US-based clients and its payment of a $30 million settlement to the SEC.

Despite this setback for the market, Ethereum is still a promising investment due to the altcoin’s daily trading volume of $7,433,845,302 and market cap of $185,903,721,394. There are several grounds to believe that ETH will once again increase in value, including Visa’s recent announcement that it is testing stablecoin payments on the Ethereum network.

Parithosh Jayanthi, a developer for the Ethereum Foundation, declared that the “Zhejiang” public testnet will debut on 1 February. In order for validators to prepare for the anticipated modifications for the Shanghai hard fork, the implementation will permit staked Ether withdrawal in a test environment.

According to Diogo Mónica, co-founder and president of Anchorage Digital, a cryptocurrency bank with a market cap of over $3 billion, the Merge’s success transformed Ethereum from “a smart contract platform lagging behind” into “something that was doing things properly.” This is accurate: After the Merge, institutional interest in ETH staking rose, according to Matt Hougan, CIO at Bitwise Asset Management.