Ethereum is close to reaching a major milestone with the currency rising to a new all time high of about $2950.
Its market cap is close to overtaking $340 billion, which translates to about 35% of bitcoin’s market cap, its highest level in three years.
That’s because the ratio has significantly risen, reaching a high of 0.05157 bitcoin with it currently at 0.05138 as the money network seemingly turns bullish.
Ethereum has been on an uptrend since the 25th of April, up from $2160 to now knocking on the doors of $3,000.
In great part that’s because some network improvements have allowed for an increase in capacity which has led to a 5x drop in network fees from the average of $50 (including smart contract transactions) to now between $8 and $10.
Flashbots have contributed to this drop in congestion as well as sandwich bots becoming sophisticated smart contracts where to include a frontrunning or arbitraging transaction, the frontrunner includes in a smart contract transaction an if/then completion of the entire operation for a miner’s fee.
Apparently this can be sandwiched too, with bot wars all the rage in eth as hackers keep hacking hackers.
The good news for the rest is the network is now less congested, so removing the narrative of eth ‘killers,’ at least to some extent, as ethereum has somewhat improved now.
It’s to improve a lot further following a successful devnet for the ethereum 2.0 merger with Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, commenting on it after publishing to state:
“One cautionary point to be clear: this is testing a chain that’s post-merge from genesis. Work on the merge transition has not properly started. Though the devs do not expect that the transition will be that hard compared to the other work,” emphasis his.
It’s still a major milestone in getting all this from paper to running code, with it looking like Proof of Stake is on its way.
That gave the price a boost of another $100, with the big question being whether it sideways here and jumps above $3,000, or sideways and corrects down to maybe $2424.
There’s also the no sideway at all option, but it has been sidewaying since at least yesterday, with the even bigger question being whether bitcoin has anything to do with it.
Bitcoin tried to take the show a couple of days ago and it has risen to nearly $57,000, but amazingly eth was unwilling to give up the stage and jumped even more than bitcoin.
Can’t say we’ve ever seen that in may years of reporting. Maybe and we’ve just forgotten but in another time bitcoin would have gone to $60k and eth would have tried to keep $2,700.
In our time, eth appears to have gained some independence, with some even mentioning that flippening thing.
In 2017, one could believe it. In 2021, the belief is probably not quite there but the speculation of potentially maybe is perhaps somewhere.
For belief, eth needs to become a finished product in as far as the market wants to see it be actually scalable as without that advantage it isn’t too different from bitcoin to overtake it.
There’s L2 solutions in the works and even a vision of how it can all come together with it all potentially working on eth due to its smart contracts, while in bitcoin it didn’t quite work, yet maybe, as everyone thinks the Lightning Network is a mess.
However for the market as a whole these are probably theories, promises, yadayada and they probably won’t quite believe any of it until they get to see the results in action themselves once they all launch and they get to Metamask.
Once that’s done and they are satisfied, then maybe it does even flippen. Without it, we may well get the meme anyway, but fundamentally what is probably happening is ethereum is going mainstream in awareness, at least in America and maybe in Europe.
The incoming ‘setting in stone’ if you like of its monetary policy removes a lot of uncertainty as thereafter we should be spared any monetary committee unless there’s some extraordinary and unforeseeable event.
Eth getting its final form there removes one advantage for bitcoin, its known and unchangeable fixed limit, because eth will likewise have a known and unchangeable issuance level.
That clearly has given eth some gains on the ratio, and may continue to do so, with the target for this cycle at maybe $1 trillion market cap, but who knows.
