Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency in the world, second only to Bitcoin in popularity and importance for the larger marketplace. Since the beginning of 2023, the coin has been gradually on the mend following last year’s troubles, when prices plummeted quite severely. Investors estimate that the ecosystem will soon be in the midst of a serious bull run and that all strategies should focus on that going forward.
Binance has begun recording renewed interest from those looking to buy Ethereum, especially since the prices are expected to continue climbing. Therefore, the best time to purchase cryptocurrencies is before values take them out of reach for some investors or selling becomes more profitable.
20%
In April, the Shanghai upgrade enabled investors to withdraw staked Ethereum, a first for the blockchain. Many believed this would destabilize the network and severely impact prices, but luckily, these predictions didn’t materialize. What happened instead is that, following a relatively short period of withdrawals, investors went back to staking.
Researchers proposed several possible reasons for this shift, the most important being that now traders know they have the option to withdraw, they’re more likely to add coins in staking endeavours as well. Currently, around 20% of the Ethereum supply is staked. The milestone was achieved on July 7th and amounted to approximately $45 billion.
Placing tokens on the platform creates better security and enables those who do it to receive rewards. Roughly 24 million coins are located across 744,000 validators. This shift comes with other upgrades on the Ethereum blockchain, such as the shift to a proof-of-stake consensus model. The system is more environmentally friendly.
These moves have been seen as fundamental for the network’s progress, helping the market align with security goals and enabling the adequate functioning of the decentralized networks. It’s also important to remember that the safety aims were achieved without impacting the economic incentives and hurting the transactions, which many investors saw as a milestone to be proud of.
Price predictions
Predicting how cryptocurrency prices will evolve is nothing new for the community. Since values tend to be rather volatile, investors feel that predictions can add an extra layer of security and ensure that their portfolios and capital are safer. However, many investors have discussed that these estimations are often unreliable and that it’s difficult to know which version you should follow. After all, it seems that all predictions differ from those before them.
However, the current situation is different, as investors seem to have agreed on how the market will evolve over the near future. Most are now certain that the momentum will hold and prices will remain bullish throughout the year. Some investors and researchers take it further and believe that 2024 and 2025 are the years that will bring the biggest changes to the market. According to them, even if the prices fall a little, a rebound is very likely, and the prices are unlikely to be impacted in the long run.
Currently, the Ethereum price continues to rise alongside that of Bitcoin. Recently, a community that offers predictions and is known for an accuracy rating of approximately 93% used a machine learning algorithm to determine what values investors can expect for the end of July. According to the results, ETH will be $2,105 by July 31st, meaning the coin will breach the $2,000 resistance barrier.
Since the beginning of 2023, Ethereum has climbed by around 62%, in stark contrast with the low values of November and December 2022. It outperformed almost 90% of the top 100 digital finance assets during the same time frame, a considerable achievement that shows the ETH coin remains strong and highly valuable among investors. As of the 12th of July, Ethereum has been trading above the 200-day moving average. The past thirty days recorded a 53% increase, with sixteen green ones in total.
ZK rollup
The Ethereum blockchain is well-known for innovations and developments, constantly changing and bringing new features to the cryptocurrency environment. ZK rollups are scalability solutions for layer-2, enabling the blockchains to complete transactions considerably faster, all while keeping gas fees low. The increased performance comes from the technology used, combining on and off-chain processing.
Recently, Ethereum welcomed a new zero-knowledge rollup on Linea, located on the Ethereum mainnet. This network is also aimed to scale down the experience on the blockchain by using existing applications and introducing new ones that would perhaps be too pricey to use on the mainnet itself.
The change comes after Linea’s testing environment on Goerli when developers tested the functionalities of the new features to see how well they’d do when used regularly. Nearly 6 million wallet addresses were executed as part of almost 50 million transactions. The Linea mainnet is set to introduce a few other features, including:
- Dynamic fee mechanisms which will be deployed to manage the Ethereum gas fees. These costs were particularly elevated at the beginning of the year, causing a momentary decline in engagement rates, as many investors couldn’t afford the extra costs.
- A canonical ERC-20 bridge that can enable the tokens to be created directly on Linea, especially when they’re bridged.
- Batch conflation is designed to permit further cost reduction by optimizing transactions occurring on layer-2. This will also allow them to fit better into a batch sent to layer-1 on the blockchain.
- A new outer proof system is also expected to be introduced as part of the upgrades as well.
The cryptocurrency market is still changing and evolving, and the market will continue to remain a center of innovation for the financial world. While prices are bound to change in the future, it’s unlikely that the crypto winter and bearish tendency will return anytime soon. Hence, investors need to prepare their strategy to account for all the shifts that can occur to protect their capital.
