After The Merge, Ethereum will benefit from having the preferred consensus mechanism from an ESG perspective and therefore also a regulatory perspective.As staking returns should to be in the high single digits, longer-term institutional investors may look to stake ETH once the uncertainty created by the lock up period is removed.Depending on the gas prices, transaction fee burns may be larger than the staking rewards, making the system slightly deflationary after The Merge.Interest rate policy is driving price action in the digital asset space and there is a close correlation between the Ethereum price decline and the fall in the Nasdaq Composite.Direct policy firming at the final four FOMC meetings of the year may not be as robust as current Fed communications or market expectations now indicate.In December I wrote an article titled: Those Aren't Really Hawks: Ascendant Bitcoin Under Historic Fed Stimulus. The article made three points. First, though there had been a severe shift in Fed members' targets for year-end 2022, the federal funds rate would remain historically low despite the coming hikes. Second, the simple lesson from the FOMC's quantitative easing history is that generally their balance sheet increases and each new phase is more substantial than in prior expansions. Last, that these tendencies over time should be supportive of harder assets in the crypto space with strong tokenomics, especially Bitcoin (BTC-USD)...
