Cryptocurrencies, everything from Bitcoin and Ethereum to Binance Coin and Chainlink, have seen a crazy past three days. On Wednesday, traders were greeted with a massive 10% drop; on Friday, the cryptocurrency market’s capitalization gained literal dozens of billions of dollars in a few hours’ time.
Despite the overall market moving in the same direction, not everyone came out on top during the move. Most notably, altcoins.
Ethereum, for instance, is only trading at around 12% higher than its weekly low of $158, while Bitcoin is up by a jaw-dropping 23%. The trend of Bitcoin outpacing its smaller competitors has been reflected across the entire cryptocurrency market.
Despite this, the bull case for ETH is purportedly growing. In fact, an analyst is starting to eye 40% growth for the second-largest cryptocurrency.
Ethereum Surge On Its Way
Brave New Coin’s Josh Olszewicz recently noted that in November, he expects ETH’s price to see an edge-to-edge Ichimoku Cloud move from $183 to $260 — a 40% move higher. While this seems crazy, the recent move has made the charts of many cryptocurrencies bullish once again.
$ETH 183 —> 260 e2e looking likely in nov pic.twitter.com/yFxAhDukA9
— Josh Olszewicz (I will not dm you) (@CarpeNoctom) October 26, 2019
The fundamentals support growth in the value of ETH.
According to a piece from CoinDesk, Ethereum’s next system-wide upgrade, Istanbul, will be activating on the mainnet likely during the week of December 4th. During a developer call on October 25th, Danno Ferrin, blockchain protocol engineer at ConsenSys, proposed the activation of the technical upgrade at the block number of 9,056,000, which coincides with the December 4th date.
That’s far from the end of it. At the turn of the month, IKEA revealed that it had used an Ethereum-powered platform to settle an invoice with an Icelandic furniture retailer. Weeks before that, Chicago-based financial services giant Morningstar was reported by Forbes to have started the process of migrating its credit ratings business to a blockchain system that involves Ethereum smart contracts and oracles.
And most recently, Thomson Reuters, the Canadian media giant, has claimed that it is looking to use OpenLaw, a ConsenSys-backed, Ethereum-centric firm working on automating legal contracts and such.
And, DeFiPulse recently noted that demand for Ethereum-based finance applications has continued to rocket higher, despite and partially due to the recent volatility in the cryptocurrency markets.
Total ETH locked in #DeFi (currently 2.311M) is approaching its all-time high of 2.332M, levels last seen in mid-April 2019.
At the moment, ~2.13% of all ETH is locked in DeFi. pic.twitter.com/ANKbJ6kwjQ
— DeFi Pulse 🍇 (@defipulse) October 24, 2019
Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash