Here are important headlines that made their way from the cryptocurrency market.

At the beginning of this week, cryptocurrency prices struggled a little as the crypto market went into a period of consolidation. Despite the weak momentum, Bitcoin, the world's most popular and the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, dipped at the US$40,000 mark and is trading around US$38,000, at the time of writing. The market cap, however, is stable at US$755 billion.

While Bitcoin is staggering to surpass the US$40,000 mark, its rival Ether is seeing a spike. At the time of writing, it is trading at US$2,633, up by more than 1.26%. Its market cap also rose above US$306 billion. But the trend for the rest of the cryptocurrency market is marked in red. XRP, Cardano, Stellar, Dogecoin, Chainlink, and Dogecoin declined by approximately 1.3% to 2.5%. Investors are not worried about this bullish trend as it was more or less expected by market experts. According to them, the next week is going to be indecisive for the cryptocurrency market, till it finds a neutral point.

A New Boost for Ether

Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency as per the market cap and its blockchain network, Ethereum, is expected to undergo a big shift. Its upgrade called London has Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1599 that aims at changing the way transactions fees or gas fees are calculated.

At present, users have to bid for the price they are willing to pay for their Ether transactions to be picked by a miner, which is a pricy matter. User the new upgrade, this process will be handled by an automated bidding system with a defined fee amount that fluctuates on the basis of how worked up the network is.

Another new aspect of this upgrade is that a part of every transaction fee will be removed from circulation which will reduce the supply of the crypto coin and hike its price. Hence, experts believe that EIP-1599 is one of the most significant upgrades to the Ethereum network since its launch. For investors, this implies that there will be a positive run for Ether in the short term and result in a big boost in the long term. It has the potential to improve the user experience, and leverage other innovations on Etherum's network like DeFi apps and the proof-of-stake model.