Indian cryptocurrency exchanges are witnessing a bump up in trading volumes of Ether, the second-most valuable crypto in the world, ahead of Ethereum’s transition into a less energy-intensive technology to run its blockchain.

The ‘The Merge’ or how the transition is expected to take place sometime on September 15 and is being touted as one of the most important events for the crypto industry.

The switch is expected to reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by almost 99.95 percent.

According to reports, the price of Ether, which had mostly trended higher over the last seven days, fell by about seven percent in the last 24 hours, according to data platform Coingecko.com.

The Merge was sent in motion on September 6 with the implementation of the Bellatrix Upgrade.
According to the Ethereum Foundation's blog, the upgrade activates in two phases: the first, named Bellatrix, and the second, named Paris.

Indian crypto trading platforms are seeing a surge in trading of Ether ahead of the Merge, as per reports.

Minal Thukral, executive vice president, growth and strategy, CoinDCX says, “Trading activity on Ether “has been seeing increased traction with volumes up 70-80 percent (last seven-day volume, as compared to our average weekly volume on that pair) than our usual volume on Eth pairs.”

CoinSwitch Kuber has seen a 61 percent increase in traffic for Ether on its app from September 5-13. The number of Ether trades on the app had also gone up by 36 percent during this period, according to reports.

Ashish Singhal, cofounder and CEO, CoinSwitch Kuber says, “Ethereum has the highest adoption among developers and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects and is the primary infrastructure layer of Web3.”