The future of the second-largest cryptocurrency is hampered by the US dollar index’s recovery. On Thursday, the price of Ethereum (ETH) showed just slight decreases.
Ethereum Consolidates
On July 21, price movement in the cryptocurrency market as a whole was mostly muted as traders took a day to digest recent gains and book profits after the strongest relief bounce since early June.
The Ethereum Merge has remained at the top of the list despite rumors regarding what sparked the recent spike. After a preliminary date of Sept. 19 was chosen for the mainnet Merge, the market rally accelerated.
The price of Ether (ETH), which reached a high of $1,620 on July 20, retraced to a low of $1,463 in the early trading hours of July 21, according to TradingView data, and has since recovered back above support at $1,500.
ethereETH/USD back around $1,500. Source: TradingView
Following the initial price spike caused by the Merge news, here is what various analysts anticipate will happen as Ether’s mainnet switch to proof-of-stake draws near.
Market analyst Rekt Capital posted the following chart showing the significance of Ether’s weekly finish over $1,300 and subsequent rise higher, describing the retreat on July 21 as a good development.
Rekt Captial said:
“Though #ETH could just continue higher to reach the upper orange region, it would be healthier for ETH to dip. Such a retest of the lower orange area would only increase probability of continuation.”
With this outlook in mind, the pullback on July 21 raises the prospect of a rise to $1,700 soon.
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Vitalik Hints At Future Of ETH
The co-founder of Ethereum detailed his plans for future developments on Thursday at the Ethereum Community Conference in France that go far beyond the network’s switch to proof of stake. The upgrade—often referred to as “the merge” since it will integrate the Ethereum mainnet with the proof-of-stake beacon chain—is actually the first in a series of modifications that are being planned.
Ethereum will then go through additional improvements that Buterin refers to as the “surge,” “verge,” “purge,” and “splurge” after the merging, which he believes is extremely close because “the only thing left to do is do a merge on Ropsten [test network],” he said during the conference. Buterin mentioned a goal to strengthen the Ethereum network being the reason behind the network continuous updates.
Ethereum will only be about 55% complete after the integration, which is anticipated to be finished this September.
The surge is due to the addition of Ethereum sharding, a scaling solution that, according to the Ethereum Foundation, will make layer-2 blockchains even more affordable, reduce the cost of rollups or bundled transactions, and make it simpler for users to run nodes that protect the Ethereum network. Buterin added that following the spike
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Featured image from Shutterstock, chart from TradingView.com