Chapter 2 : Ethereum in focus Chart 2 : Cryptocurrency ETP flow in 2022 , as at 23 August
existing prime brokers .
Market makers play an essential role , as the industry and market are reliant on the skills and expertise of participants like market makers and authorised participants to provide liquidity in both the primary and secondary market . Challenges that market makers face when trading crypto ETPs can range from topics such as market infrastructure , liquidity and counterparty risk , which over the past few years has seen significant improvement . One challenge unique to crypto ETPs is hard forks .
A hard fork is a system upgrade or upgrade to the underlying blockchain protocol . In the case of hard forks , the new blocks created under the updated rules are no longer accepted by nodes running the older legacy version of the software and are de facto rejected . This rejection creates a scenario where the two chains are no longer compatible . Historically there have been a number of hard forks such at bitcoin core , bitcoin cash and ethereum classic to name a few .
Current headlines have been populated with speculation and commentary around the upcoming ethereum merge . For those who have not been following recent developments , ethereum ’ s mainnet is set to merge with the Beacon Chain ’ s proof-of-stake system , which will mark the end of
Source : Bloomberg the proof-of-work ethereum we know today and begin the next phase of ethereum 2.0 – the version that will be based on a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm .
While the broader ethereum community has widely supported the merge , there has been some
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