THE ETHEREUM SHAPELLA TESTNET

Most major altcoins have a non-profit foundation that increases growth including Ethereum and some people in the cryptocurrency community has taken this as a hint from Gary Gensler that he thinks Ethereum is a security. Of course, the first hint that chairman of SEC Gary Gengler gave back in September said crypto could be a security. He said this statement on the same day the Ethereum blockchain moved from POW to POS. Unfortunately, the price of ETH crashed by 11% at that statement but after then, Gary Gensler's comment was quickly forgotten by people. Not until recently that concern started to rise after the SEC started going after centralized Exchange staking services in later months.

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Kraken which is a centralized Exchange platform was the first to settle the SEC and it is likely not going to be the last that SEC will be going after. The thing is that the SEC is majorly focusing on the centralized part of the cryptocurrency world, be it the staking service or the other part. In other words, the centralized stablecoins are at risk, and decentralized blockchains like Ethereum will be protected from serious scrutiny by the regulators. But this could change when ETH stakers are allowing withdraw their staked ETH and claim their staking reward. The way the SEC view ETH could change after the upcoming Shanghai upgrade but until then, they still view ETH as a POW asset.

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The Ethereum Shapella testnet is live now and this is the testnet before the mainnet. You should know that the Shanghai upgrade is very bullish for Ethereum because a successful upgrade will draw more attention from institutional investors. Right now, it since like we are yet to see a positive price active reflecting in the price of ETH ahead of the Shanghai upgrade and it makes be because of the regulatory uncertainty in the crypto market. Another reason may be because of the uncertainty that ETH validators are going to sell their coin after unstaking their ETH.