Today Ethereum rests around $2500, but some analysts believe there are buffers built into the current market to prevent it from slipping much lower, or alternately, that investors are protecting themselves for an extended rout.
Omkar Godbole at Coindesk references a trend toward traders buying put options to protect against lower Ether per-coin values.
“A single trader or several traders bought more than 36,000 contracts of Deribit-listed ether put option expiring on March 18, of which more than 20,000 were blocked on institution-focused over-the-counter tech platform Paradigm, according to Swiss-based data tracking firm Laevitas,” Godbole writes. “The put option buyers would make money if ether drops below $2,200 by March 18. That’s a roughly 13% decline from the current market price of $2,514.”
ETH is already at a 10-day low, and a more historic chart shows quite a lot of blood loss for the cryptocurrency. The coin lost a full half of its value from November 7 to January 26, slowly deflating from $4800 to $2400.
All of this, to some, is rather astounding for a blockchain that is hailed as the top smart contract handling infrastructure.
However, as the crypto world innovates data on the blockchain, there are many “Ethereum killers” on the loose.
Designers are creating data on the blockchain projects based on Bitcoin SV or other options like Solana.
“There are quite a few things that point toward BSV potentially regaining its foothold and starting to rise again,” writes Daria Morgen at Changelly blog. “For example, a new record-breaking 2.5Gb block has recently been found on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. Scalability is a huge issue in the crypto world, and many projects aim to solve it. It could be that Bitcoin SV has the potential to provide the best solution.”
Meanwhile, Ethereum continues to lose steam in some quarters due to high gas fees and other challenges.
Factor all of the above into your crypto plays.