At the end of 2017 many people thought that this year Ethereum will show everyone who's the boss here and overtake the bitcoin. But instead, Ethereum lost 92% of its value and lost its solid 2nd position to Ripple cryptocurrency. That is why, after a year has passed, many people foresee a complete fall of Ethereum, while its fans still hope for a Bull market to come.
What will happen to Ethereum? Will it reach a complete bottom or bounce off flying to the moon? Can Vitalik Buterin bring his project back to life?
Who has dropped Ethereum?
Today Ethereum costs about 150 dollars, and last time it was sold so cheap in the middle of 2017, and when price reached the top, one Ethereum was given for 1400 dollars. There are several reasons why this kind of fall happened.
Bitcoin had been becoming cheaper and cheaper the whole 2018 and cryptowinter does not give mercy to anyone. Despite all the differences between Ethereum and the first cryptocurrency, it is just one of the Altcoins. The bitcoin still has the lead role at the market, and if it falls – others will fall together with it.
The fact that it is a leading platform for ICO did not help to Ethereum. Two rivals EOS and TRON could not shake the leading position of Ethereum in such terms, the majority of tokens are released through Ethereum, and in the reality it worked out in disadvantage. Day by Day we can hear about scammers and incompetent workers having been increased on the market. Those workers do not seem the scam, but they do not know what they want, and how to achieve that. ICO has received 2 billions and 600 millions dollars of investments on February of 2018, and just 65 millions dollar on November, it means 40 times less.
Those projects which could realize a tokensale, and release the complete product have to sell out the collected Ethereum to finance their developments. Advertising, office rent, food and other expenses have to be paid in fiat after all. That is why ICO projects were sold for 400 thousand of Ethereums the last month, and such sellouts have been organized during the whole year. According to approximate estimates, 3 millions of Ethereum coins are stored on ICO`s accounts, and it will be at the market in the coming month as well.
The developers of Ethereum are partly guilty in its failure. They promised to solve the problem of network scaling with the help of sharding and moving to the mining algorithm of Proof-of-stake and to create Ethereum 2.0.
Practice shows while Vitalik Buterin were clapping his hands, singing the songs at conferences and talking on Twitter about possible job changing, even a preliminary Constantinople upgrade did not happen, the one which was moved to January of 2019 after a series of serious bugs when testing network was activated. As a result we have the same slow, expensive, and difficult platform to use, instead of the updated Ethereum, the miners are running out of it in large numbers. The reason is cryptocurrency mining became unprofitable after the fall of an exchange rate.
Why is it so bad?
Maybe it is not so bad as we think. Hardfork Constantinople will be held despite all difficulties and problems. At the Devcon Conference in Prague Vitalik Buterin said that they are working for an Ethereum network modernization. At the end, we will be able to have block chain with throughput stability with one thousand transactions in a second, which will work with POS mining and it is going to be wide scale.
Everything will be done with help of Serenity update which will start with a hardfork Constantinople activation. Also developers of Ethereum are trying to develop second level, for example Plasma and update for protection from ASIC miners. Why do they need last one, anyway they are going to move to a POS mining? The answer is not clear.
Despite all eccentricity Vitalik Buterin is the one of the most authoritative man in crypto industry and he is ready to fight for his project. So Ethereum until now has a strong and powerful leader. Recently Vitalik was an excellent example for a community when he gave away three thousand of Ethereums, three hundred thousand dollars in other words, to three startups which are working on Ethereum 2.0 and complaining about financial issues on twitter.
One more interesting thing, which shows Ethereum is not out of the game. During 2018 a huge owners of cryptocurrency known as whales, were always increasing their capitals. When the majority were selling theirs Ethereum, whales were buying it. Right now they are controlling about 20% of all coins. And those guys control big amount of money to make mistakes in the investments. If it is necessary they can just turn market up to the right direction.
Where will Ethereum price go?
It is time to make a conclusion and talk about the future of Ethereum as a platform and cryptocurrency. As you all know, we were just assuming and by no means it is a financial recommendation. We can see the situation in this way but how do you see it – leave your comments below.
Ethereum 2.0 is going to show up and maybe in not that condition as we are waiting. Ethereum have the biggest and united army of developers and users who target is work with smart-contracts and decentralized apps. Nevertheless EOS and TRON may still enjoy their faster and cheaper transactions, but it will not be so forever.
Let’s talk about price now. Our forecast is not very optimistic regarding the near future, though everything depends on your trading strategy. We are inclined to support the point of view of the well-known trader Tony Veis, and other experts who predict Ethereum continue to fall by 60, 30 or even 15 dollars. Those who could fight till the end will enter the market at such levels. The consolidation of assets and preparation to a new race will happen at such price levels when crypto spring comes. It is possible Ethereum updates to be nicely accepted by the market, and it will be able to show the growth regardless of the current trend.
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