Ethereum has crossed above $1,700 once again after testing $1,500s over the past week.
Its ratio has also jumped to near a new local high of 0.0737 bitcoin, its highest level since May. The reason?
Well, probably the merge. This is becoming now the one thing everyone is talking about as there’s just about five weeks left to go until ethereum’s upgrade.
The loud talk of a new ethereum PoW fork has further focused the spotlight on the Merge upgrade as the triple halvening now gets an airdrop bonanza.
A lot will break on PoW defi however, but whatever works will be more than nothing, and way more than on ETC.
Yet ETC is a top 20 coin now with a market cap of $5 billion at close to $40 per coin. Their supply is also a lot more than eth by 14 million coins, to not mentioned the burned coins and the locked ones in staking.
So ETHW, the EthereumPoW coin, may get a price of at least $100, probably $200, and that’s at a base stable level.
The market cap of all defi tokens on eth is $63 billion, so add another 10% of that at six billion and this easily becomes the biggest airdrop by far.
The macro also seems to be getting a bit better investment wise with stocks down 1% on opening, but Nasdaq is now down just 0.08%.
Ethereum is significantly outperforming with it up 6%, but after the fall in oil and gas prices as well as interest rates now nearing 3%, the market probably thinks the worst is over where monetary policy is concerned.
As one of the assets that fell the most, eth might also be the biggest gainer in any upcoming Fed pivot, and so we have it outperforming bitcoin, stocks, and at 6%, probably most other assets.
The big question now being just how much the fork will add or take away from eth. Prior to it, you’d expect a lot of wider crypto value to come to eth to get the ‘airdrop’ and even fresh fiat might move in with that being the precise plan of Arthur Hayes.
On the fork itself, there will probably be intense speculation and huge volatility, but the combined value of the two should be bigger than just prior to the fork.
Bitcoin mooned after its own fork in 2016 and following its own halvening. A moon here for autumn or next year seems to be in no one’s mind, but who knows.
On the downside, the ETC fork of eth led to a mini-winter, but that was a hostile and a proxy fork in the bitcoin scalability debate while eth was far smaller than bitcoin.
The BSV fork of BCH led to a depthening of the winter in 2018, but that wasn’t a fork as much as a pretty direct attack that somewhat tragically split the BCH community with the BSV forkers being even more hostile than the ETC lot.
While this PoW fork is benign cuddly bunnies by comparison and keeps some of the PoW value in the ethereum ecosystem, so should overall add value.
At least that seems to be what the market is currently speculating with eth seemingly once again taking the show.
Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2022/08/05/ethereum-crosses-1700-ratio-jumps