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The ETH rally between July 13 and 18 gave such a boost in July's $1.26 billion monthly options expiry, that Ethereum developers quickly set a tentative date for the "Merge," a transition out of the burdensome proof-of-work (PoW) mining mechanism. According to some analysts, by removing the additional ETH issuing used to finance the energy cost required on traditional mining consensus, Ether could finally achieve the "ultra-sound money" status.
Whether or not sound monetary policy revolves around constantly changing the issuing and burning rules remains an open question, but there's no doubt that the Ethereum developers' video call on July 14 helped to catapult ETH's price. On July 26, a sudden dramatic spike in Ethereum network active addresses raised multiple speculations about whether Ether is targeting its previous all-time high. Analytics firm Santiment reported that the number of 24-hour daily active addresses reached 1.06 million, breaking the previous 718,000 high set back in 2018. Theories such as "Binance doing a maintenance sweep" emerged, but nothing has been confirmed yet.
The main victims of Ether's impressive 20% recovery on July 27 were leveraged bearish traders (shorts) who faced $335 million in aggregate liquidations at derivatives exchanges, according to data from Coinglass. The open interest for Ether's July monthly options expiry is $1.27 billion, but the actual figure will be lower since bears were overly-optimistic. These traders got too comfortable after ETH stood below $1,300 between June 13 and 16. The pump above $1,500 on July 27 surprised bears because only 17% of the put (sell) options for July 29 have been placed above that price level.
