3 cryptocurrencies that could see price surges as a result of Ethereum's switch to PoS mechanism

Ethereum Classic is the original version of the Ethereum blockchain that was forked over disagreements around The DAO. The DAO was an ETH-based investment organisation which was hacked after bad actors found a bug in its platform and exploited it to syphon upwards of $70 million.

After the attack, some people wanted to fork the network and compensate those who lost their money. However, another group opposed this idea, stating that users should suffer the consequences of poorly researched investments.

The disagreement led to the fork of the Ethereum blockchain, where Ethereum emerged (ETH) as the new network, and Ethereum Classic (ETC) continued as the original chain.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a proof-of-work blockchain and plans to remain that way until the foreseeable future. Therefore, ETH miners see it as a viable option after the Ethereum mainchain moves to the PoS consensus mechanism. It's one of the reasons why the price of ETC has surged over the last couple of months.

It has spiked from $21.92 at the start of July to $32.96 at the time of writing, representing a 50 percent hike in 3 months. The prominent mining pool operator, AntPool, has also come out and publicly supported ETC with a $10 million investment to back quality projects built on Ethereum Classic (ETC).

Also, ETC has a limited supply of coins, which could further fuel the its potential rally once The Merge goes live.

After The Merge, miners will be replaced by stakers. The only catch is that you need to pledge at least 32 ETH to participate in the staking activity. That's roughly $52,000 at current rates. It's not something everyone can afford to lock up in a staking contract for months and months.

This is where platforms like Lido come in. They offer staking pool services where many underfunded stakers can collect their ETH and start staking as a collective. Staking rewards are then distributed based on the amount of ETH contributed to the staking pool.

Lido is the largest staking service in terms of value locked into The Merge's official smart contract. It currently contributes to over 30 percent of the total staked value; that's almost the same as Coinbase, Kraken and Binance put together. Therefore, if The Merge goes smoothly, Lido could see even more stakers flood into their system, which should send its governance (LDO) token skyrocketing. LDO has already pumped more than 106 percent over the last three months, going from $1.0008 at the start of July to $2.07 at the time of writing. The token even touched a high of $3.059 in mid-August.

ENS is a naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. It allows users and businesses to convert machine-readable private keys into human-readable names. For instance, an Ethereum private key such as '6f867cm28ih8wk' can be mapped to a human-readable name such as 'XYZ.eth.'

This is similar to what Domain Name Service (DNS) does. It maps complicated IP addresses to easy-to-remember website URLs. Therefore ENS goes a long way in simplifying decentralised transactions. It also ensures that input errors while typing private keys are reduced.

Over the last three months, ENS rallied 23 percent, going from $10.8 at the start of July to 13.34 at the time of writing. ENS even touched a high of $18.1 at the beginning of August but lost most of its gains due to the recent turbulence in the crypto market. However, ENS might soon see an uptick, with the protocol recording 2,744 ETH ($4.7 million) in revenue in August — its third highest grossing month in history.

While the company has downplayed the impact of The Merge on rising sales, the transition from PoW to PoS cannot be ruled out as a potential reason behind the platform's rise over the last couple of months.

The Merge is expected to cause a significant price surge for ETH. Some experts believe it could send Ethereum rallying to the $3,000 mark in the coming months. Moreover, being such a massive event in the history of cryptocurrencies, The Merge may lift several other related coins and tokens as well.