New reports show that the second biggest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is thriving this week, having reached the point of $120 after falling well below that in past weeks.
“ETH had reclaimed the second position on the top cryptocurrencies list by market capitalization with a current total market cap of $12.75 billion, whereas Ripple on the third place has $12.5 billion,” Jonathan Goldman wrote at Cryptopotato today. “The fact that Bitcoin recently gained 10% affected ETH better than its effect on XRP’s prioce. Ripple is considered one of the cryptocurrencies with the highest percentage of inverse correlation to Bitcoin.”
Goldman also mentions some of the events that caused volatility to Ethereum over the past two months – perhaps the most prominent one is the ETH hard fork called Constantinople.
Constantinople is due to happen later this month – but traders have been talking about it, and it has affected Ethereum prices. Goldman suggests that just the news of Constantinople was enough to put a dent in ETH’s short-term nose ahead.
“The Constantinople Ethereum hard-fork, that was previously delayed to February 27, 2019, caused ETH to decline and lose the title of the second largest crypto to Ripple,” Goldman wrote.
Constantinople will involve block reward reductions, bitwise shifting instructions for the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), and reduction of the dreaded “cost of gas” which makes certain types of transactions cheaper.
Looking at technical indicators, Goldman sees a descending trend line and a strong resistance level.
“From the bearish side, if ETH price gets rejected by the descending trend-line, then the $100 price level could become the next support target for ETH,” he wrote, citing recent chart activity and corrections from the last rally.
In any case, Ethereum has regained its second-place crown – but the horse race is far from over. Right now Ripple is down significantly, but there are all kinds of possibilities that later this year or next year, Ripple but will be way ahead of Ethereum, or some dark course cryptocurrency will be dominating market share. It’s kind of like a horse race that never ends – but what many traders are banking on is that cryptocurrency prices in general will continue to rise. Digital currencies can beat inflation. They can beat fiat currencies. And they can gain value as adoption increases.