Bahamian cryptocurrency exchange FTX has clarified that trading on Ethereum would remain active all through the merge and will only suspend [and not halt] deposits and withdrawals of wrappers and layer 2.
These are Arbitrum One, Solana [Wormhole], and Binance Smart Chain [BSC] which will be reopened after the Merge is completed and networks return to stability, the updated blog read.
FTX deleted the original tweet which said it would temporarily disable blockchain transfers of secondary chains for ETH to ensure the settlement is clean. Nevertheless, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried a.k.a. SBF later confirmed that trading would stay unaffected.
One month ago, the crypto spot and derivatives exchange announced that ETH-related futures markets would not be impacted before the scheduled merge.
The trading platform with its headquarters in the Caribbean nation of Bahamas elucidated via a blog post that it won’t suspend or settle ether derivatives like futures and perpetual before the integration and that it plans to continue live trading throughout the event.
FTX- “We will do our best to support continuous trading”
The exchange also informed users that its Ethereum futures and perpetual contracts [ETH-0930, ETH-1230, ETH-PERP] will monitor the proof of stake in Ethereum after the Merge. “We will do our best to support continuous trading,” it added.
As per CoinGecko, FTX is the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily derivatives trading volume. The exchange has supported derivatives contracts worth $7.5 billion as per the latest data.
Among other crypto assets, the exchange also provides futures and perpetual contracts with ether as their underlying value.
In addition to that, data from various reports noted that the aggregate open interest of ether futures across exchanges has increased from $5 billion in mid-June to more than $7.7 billion in August.
Moving away from the existing energy-intensive proof of work [PoW] mechanism, the much-awaited ETH update is expected to increase the network’s through-put, and make it cost-effective as well as environmentally friendly.
That also means the end of the miners’ income streak, thus eliminating a huge portion of rewards for contributing to the blockchain.