Don’t look now, but Ethereum hard forks Constantinople and St. Petersburg are now in play. February 28 was the day that the community pulled the trigger on these updates, and at first, nothing really happened.
“The fork has gone off successfully with no signs of technical issues or chain splits,” wrote David Borman at Cheipcap March 1. “However, the price of Ethereum has barely moved at all … See where the hard fork happened? Me neither. That’s because the price didn’t respond, really at all. To be fair, if things hadn’t gone well it may have been a very different story.”
Borman explained some of the stasis by suggesting that the hard forks were already baked into investors’ outlooks.
“Perhaps the reason for the apathy is that these things are largely ‘priced in.’” Borman wrote. “That is to say, the market may have moved months ago when most of these stories were rumors, but now everybody already responded to them, before they were even news.”
Through the lens of investor sentiment, Borman also highlighted the line of thought that although a reduced block reward could push prices down initially, the hard forks would be good for ETH over the long-term.
“The fact that the price is stable actually may be a good sign,” Borman wrote. “It has been speculated that the reduction of the block reward could have a negative impact on the price, though in the long term a positive one. Now, nobody was saying it would hurt the price in just the first few hours, but the fact that fear hasn’t driven the price down may be a positive sign for the inevitable rise down the line.”
This morning we have an update from Yaz Sheikh at Cryptopotato where we see that Ethereum has fallen from some of its highs last week.
“Ethereum has suffered from a break down in price action over the previous day as the market drops by 7% to $125.89,” Sheikh writes. “This comes only a few days following the Ethereum network upgrades including Constantinople and St. Petersburg hard forks. Despite this recent price decline, the coin is still up by a total of 17% over the past 30 days.”
All of this seems a bit inconclusive, especially if you think about that devil’s advocate argument that we could be experiencing some minor bumps on the road en route to much higher Ethereum prices.
You can see that many of those closest to the cryptocurrency remarked that the hard forks went well, and you see a lack of some of the volatile controversy and backbiting marking the debacle of Bitcoin Cash splitting late last year. So it’s not time to count Ethereum out – just watch the charts this week and next week to further understand how these hard forks are impacting value.
