According to CoinMarketCap, Ethereum (ETH), an open-source blockchain that supports an entire ecosystem of smart contracts, just made history when its native Ether coin hit an all-time high of $4,366.09.
At the time of writing, Ethereum’s Ether coin is trading slightly lower, hovering around the $4,235 price level. The coin has increased by 474 percent year-to-date!
In a recent post, we mentioned that a change in crypto leadership could be on the way. Bitcoin has always led the initial bull run with outsized gains in the past few bullish cycles. This was followed by a more widespread crypto mania, with altcoins leading the way. The most immediate bullish impulse for the world’s premier cryptocurrency has now been realized, as a futures-based Bitcoin ETF (BITO) has already begun trading. This scenario favors a gradual shift toward altcoins, which include well-known names like Ethereum. The current situation only emphasizes this prognosis.
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ETH/BTC
The ETH/BTC was approaching a critical support area, paving the way for an exaggerated bounce, as we stated in our previous post on this topic. This anticipated rebound has also occurred.
On a fundamental level, Ethereum is expected to undergo significant changes in the coming months. First and foremost, Optimism’s Optimistic Ethereum (OE) – a Layer 2 solution designed to address Ethereum’s scalability issue – is undergoing a major overhaul. To refresh your memory, OE assists Ethereum in performing off-chain calculations while only publishing transaction data on-chain. This has the potential to cut Ethereum’s gas fees by up to 100x, paving the way for smart contract adoption. Optimism will be fully compatible with an Ethereum Virtual Machine as part of its upcoming upgrade on October 28th (EVM). In essence, DApps or smart contracts will now be deployable on OE without undergoing any changes in the code.
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Ethereum’s Price to Reach
Meanwhile, forecasts for Ethereum’s price to reach $10,000 are becoming more confident. To wit, the same analyst who predicted Bitcoin’s current bull run is now calling for a $10,000 Ether coin. Sean Farrell, the Head of Digital Asset Strategy at Fundstrat, told Yahoo Finance Live that he expects Ether to hit $10,000 soon. This echoes our own forecast from the beginning of the summer.
Keep in mind that Goldman Sachs believes Ethereum will eventually overtake Bitcoin, owing to the open-source blockchain’s superior utility over its much larger counterpart. Nonetheless, the Wall Street behemoth believes that this scenario will only come to fruition once Ethereum 2.0 is released, signaling a shift away from energy-intensive mining and toward a much more efficient staking mechanism for transaction validation.
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