‘Price Could Skyrocket’ – Here’s When Ethereum Could Turn Bitcoin Around
Bitcoin
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Bitcoin price’s gigantic bull run in 2021 catapulted its market capitalization to over $1.2 trillion last year. It has since crashed back to just $400 billion. Meanwhile, ethereum’s own massive price rise saw it rise to over $500 billion before falling to just over $200 billion.
Now, some traders and investors are predicting that the ethereum price will rise after the long-awaited radical upgrade – potentially making ethereum more valuable than bitcoin for the first time, an event known as “the flippening.”
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Bitcoin is still around twice Ethereum’s market cap, but that may be about to change.
“Investor interest in ethereum has remained resilient as it nears the merger, its once-in-a-lifetime event that will see the entire network migrate to proof-of-stake,” Gabriel Selby, lead research analyst at cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks, said via Twitter. “Some have suggested that it could be the catalyst for ethereum to overtake bitcoin as the world’s largest coin by market capitalization.”
This week, ethereum is expected to complete the transition from the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism used by bitcoin to the more power-efficient proof-of-stake, removing ethereum’s reliance on miners and handing control to those who “stake” their ether on the network .The exchange is expected to reduce ethereum’s carbon emissions by 99%, according to the Ethereum Foundation.
Bitcoin’s dominance, a measure of its value compared to other cryptocurrencies, has fallen below 40% in recent weeks, down from a peak of nearly 50% earlier this year, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Ethereum has seen its share of the market rise to over 20%, up from a low of less than 15%.
“Since the beginning of the year, the market capitalization ratio between bitcoin and ethereum has converged to its narrowest differential since May 2021. If the current trend persists, ethereum could reach the top of the league tables by the end of 2023, or sooner,” Selby said.
While bitcoin has developed a reputation as digital gold due to its immutability and resistance to both change and censorship, ethereum is designed to be used as the foundation of a decentralized, blockchain-based internet – an idea that has become known as web3.
“With the proliferation of financial products that have allowed a much wider range of investors to express their price views in the crypto markets – such as the recently launched ethereum options contract by CME – the mechanisms are very much in place for ethereum’s market cap to overtake bitcoin, should it should be buy-in from a sufficient number of investors,” Selby added.
Earlier this year, ethereum’s co-founder and the project’s spiritual leader Vitalik Buterin revealed his plans for ethereum after the “merge” upgrade — with “surge” next in a series of improvements designed to make the network more secure and decentralized, followed by the limit. , purge and splurge upgrades.
“We believe that ethereum has great utility and when the code pruning cleanup phase starts in 2023 it will be a very good blockchain with even greater adoption,” Martin Hiesboeck, head of blockchain and crypto research at crypto trading platform Uphold, said via email , adding: “The [ethereum] the price may well skyrocket.”
Over the past year, ethereum has seen a boom in demand due to the rising popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital art and media tokenized on the ethereum blockchain.
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The Ethereum price has coincided with the bitcoin price this year.
“Ethereum has already surpassed bitcoin in terms of the number of executed transactions,” Daniel Kostecki, senior financial analyst at the investment company Conotoxia. “But it is still far behind bitcoin in the volume of transactions on the blockchain or trading on exchanges.”
Kostecki warned that it will be “difficult to take over a coin that was first in the world and whose issue is limited.” Although others are more confident that the turnaround will happen eventually.
“The merger will help global sentiment towards crypto and [the blockchain-based third iteration of the internet] web3 because the second largest blockchain is getting greener,” said Max Kordek, CEO of the decentralized application platform Lisk, in comments via email. “This is also a necessary step for ethereum to reverse bitcoin, which I predict will happen in the next big bull run. .”
