Summary
- The Berlin hard fork upgrade will likely provide the strongest fuel for growth.
- The Ethereum NFTs are increasingly becoming popular and are key to long-term growth.
Ethereum was on the decline today, going down by 7.7% in 24 hours to go for $2,133 at the time of writing. The cryptocurrency has recently hit a record-high price above $2,500 but had lost 4.7% in the past 7 days by press time. Nonetheless, the Berlin hard fork upgrade could prove to be the strongest driving force for ETH prices in the coming weeks.
Internal fixes likely to propel prices higher
Ethereum has recently launched the Berlin Hard Fork upgrade on its mainnet to solve some of its long-standing challenges. The upgrade will bring with it four EIPs to the platform. These are EIPs 2665, 2929, 2930, and 2718.
Perhaps the most significant of these will be EIP-2565 which is designed to reduce gas fees. On the other hand, EIP-2929 will significantly reduce transaction times, but this will come at a higher gas cost. EIP-2718 will enable the merging of transactions trans, and lastly, EIP-2930 will help in minimizing the risk of broken smart contracts.
A digital mining hardware manufacturer in Beijing, Bitmain has announced plans to release an ASIC miner called AntMiner E9 on the ETH blockchain. The move is a timely intervention, coming at a time when the world market is faced with a biting shortage of mining GPUs. It is also proof of a promising outlook for Ethereum, at a time when the network is already basking in record-high mining revenue.
With Ethereum riding in high, institutional investors are on a high alert. An asset management company, the Rothschild Investment has recently bought ETH worth nearly $5million through the Grayscale ETH Trust. Rothschild has over $1 billion assets under its management. This is the first time that the company has invested in Ethereum. With its momentum setting the pace for the crypto-market, more institutional investors are likely to come calling.
Hold on smart contracts key to growth
Ethereum’s control of the smart contracts platform is not without doubters. A well-known digital currency analyst, Lark Davis, believes that about five digital currency networks will intrude ETH’s dominance of the smart contract market.
The analyst has settled on Binance Smart Chain as his first choice. His second choice is Terra because of its Mirror Protocol. Davis also chose Solana because it can process thousands of transactions per second. The other ETH challengers, according to the analyst, are Polkadot and Cardano.
The NFT segment is also a key driver for Ether, and the end is certainly not in sight for its rise. In some recent developments, a trading platform in Singapore, Phemex, has picked some wallets from the total entries to be included in an NFT art. The CEO, Jack Tao, has already placed a bid of over $100,000 on the NFT, meaning that each participant will receive a minimum of USD100 unless another purchaser places a higher bid.
Still with NFTs, an Ecosystem of next-generation technology, Waves has recently completed the highest sale of its NFT Duck termed ‘perfection’ outside of Ethereum. The NFT obtained forty bids during the auction. Additionally, the Waves founder, Sasha Ivanov, recently announced that the profit earned from the auction will be used to buy back the duck NFT that will be created by hunters via the Duck Hunters games.
ETH/USD technical outlook
ETH will find support at $2,069, while the second support will be at $2,007. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) for the ETH/USD pair is at 51 and will likely drive the price to the first resistance level at $2,269. Beyond that point, the price will meet the second resistance at $2,430.
