Ethereum (ETH) is currently trading at around $168 after a 6% drop over the last 24 hours.

Negative news about Binance’s hack and Bitfinex’s Tether insolvency issue has seen the cryptocurrency markets lose some momentum as bears have taken back control. By looking at volumes, it seems the mini-pump Ethereum was going through is coming to an end.

If price returns to trade between the 50-day and 20-day EMAs, I’m expecting ETH volume to drop significantly.

In early April, Ethereum’s price went through the roof before a swift correction. As volumes show, traders are betting heavily on a price drop, way below the 50 and 20-day EMAs. Still, ETH is up about 15% since March, showing positive signs of a market recovery.

If we see positive volume coming into Ethereum, the 200-day EMA may become a new support level. If not, we can expect ETH to bounce off the 50-day EMA before touching the 200-day EMA again.

If price follows the altcoin’s fundamentals, Ethereum should be OK.

Ethereum news

If Ethereum is to become Web 3.0, it must have a good number of developers working on the infrastructure. In the best case scenario, the altcoin should have a large number of developers working on its core protocol (Ethereum) in addition to a number of developers contributing code to Ethereum’s repositories. Fortunately, Ethereum gives us the best of both worlds as it is ahead of all cryptocurrencies in both categories.

Research of developer activity from January 2018 to February 2019 conducted by Electric Capital shows that Ethereum is king in terms of developer activity, with better results than Bitcoin. It has the largest developer team in the crypto space.

On top of infrastructure developments, Ethereum is also making huge changes that will affect both miners and investors. On February 28th 2019, Ethereum finally implemented the Constantinople hard fork which featured several improvements and changes to the core protocol. The most controversial change was the proposed shift from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model.

Constantinople introduces a proposed mining model change that not only reduces ETH supply in the market, but also makes the Ethereum network stronger. With a PoS implementation, we could see a greater incentive for ETH holders as well.

The protocol implementation that will bring Casper (Ethereum’s PoS consensus mechanism) to life is currently being developed by two research projects:

• Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG)
• Casper the Friendly GHOST: Correct-by-Construction (CBC)

The aim is to add a PoS system with the ability to shard, as in the ability to horizontally partition data within a database. More generally, the database is broken into little pieces called ‘shards’ that when aggregated together form the original database. In Ethereum’s case, the database is the main blockchain, and the shards are smaller blockchains (sidechains) connected to the main chain.

If Ethereum continues to develop sidechain solutions around its main network, there could be limitless ways to scale.

We should also remember Ethereum is currently the backbone of the DeFi movement (decentralised finance), which could help with future adoption.

About Ethereum

Ethereum was launched by Vitalik Buterin on 30th July 2015. He was a researcher and programmer working on Bitcoin Magazine and he initially wrote a whitepaper in 2013 describing Ethereum. Buterin had proposed that Bitcoin needed a scripting language. He decided to develop a new platform with a more general scripting language when he couldn’t get buy in to his proposal.

More Ethereum news and information

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As with any investment, it pays to do some homework before you part with your money. The prices of cryptocurrencies are volatile and go up and down quickly. This page is not recommending a particular currency or whether you should invest or not.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.