Cosmos ($ATOM) Price Could Almost Double If A Crypto Market Rally Is Ignited, Crypto Analyst Says
A popular cryptocurrency analyst has suggested that Cosmos ($ATOM) could see its price nearly double if a rally in the cryptocurrency market is ignited by Ethereum’s upcoming Merge upgrade, which will see the network transition from its current Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to a Proof -of- Stake consensus.
According to the Coin Bureau host, who shared a video updating his 2.1 million YouTube subscribers, demand for ATOM has fallen throughout the bear market, with two main drivers currently supporting the price by bringing in new buyers.
According to the pseudonymous analyst known as Guy, ATOM’s strongest demand driver is the upcoming Cosmos projects and the airdrops they distribute to the cryptocurrency community, although some “are only given to those who hold or own ATOM in participating wallets.”
A secondary driver, Guy added, is as a “bridge currency to all the upcoming Cosmos ecosystems on more general-purpose blockchains like Evmos and Kava, which support Ethereum smart contracts.” These networks have hundreds of millions of dollars of total value locked up on their smart contracts, the analyst said.
Still, Guy sees potential for ATOM’s price to nearly double if Ethereum’s long-awaited Merge upgrade goes smoothly, as Daily Hodl reports. He said:
Now, while ATOM appears to have limited demand drivers, they have been enough to push the price up in recent months, and if this trend continues, we could see ATOM retreat close to 2x in the short to medium term.
The Ethereum Merge, which describes the network’s current mainnet merger with Beacon Chain’s PoS system and sets the stage for future scaling upgrades, including sharding, is expected to happen on September 15.
The move is expected to reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.95%, as instead of miners, there will be validators who secure the network by staking their ETH holdings. Stakers need at least 32 ETH to run block producing nodes and earn stake rewards.
As CryptoGlobe reported, Guy recently suggested that Cardano ($ADA) may soon begin to outpace flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin ($BTC) as traders begin using the cryptocurrency to hedge against Ethereum’s transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) one.
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