After a brief recovery to $226 from a recent low of $182, ethereum’s price headed down again today, below $200 at the time of writing, as a months long downtrend seemingly continues.
Traders are probably worried about Tezos, which just finished its ICO, raising $230 million, making it the largest token sale yet, magnitudes higher than Ethereum’s ICO of around $18 million back in 2015.
None of Tezos’ funds have moved, with the ICO potentially priced in as the majority of the funds, some $100 million worth at the time, was raised in its first few days.
Moreover, the developers would have probably seen the market’s recent reaction, as well as its punishment of ICOs that were seen to be cash-grabbing by quickly cashing-out huge sums, so they might take the prudent approach and cash-out slowly, over years, but it’s not yet clear what they plan to do.
The market, however, seems to have latched on that as an excuse to continue their month long down-trend, which has more than halved eth’s price since its all-time high in June.
Eth is not alone in going down as it’s seemingly taking other digital currencies down with it. That’s probably because ethereum has been leading price movements recently, with the currency enjoying higher trading volumes than any other, including bitcoin.
Its ecosystem and number of participants is probably bigger too as it has continuously been managing more transactions than bitcoin in the past few days, while its public spaces enjoy more active online users than any other digital currency.
So it may be exerting more influence on the wider ecosystem than even bitcoin at this point.
However, while ethereans were previously keen to brag about overtaking bitcoin, now they are scared bitcoin might split and take them down with it.
A “notice” on bitcoin.org warning there might be “disruptions” on August the first did not help in that regard. But if there are any such disruptions ethereum might benefit just as bitcoin arguably did when ethereum had its chain split last summer.
It is, however, unlikely bitcoin would split, even though they probably should as the current futures price of the two combined bitcoins is higher than just plain bitcoin.
But we’ll have to wait and see what they do, as well as wait and see whether today’s price movement was a fake break-out and whether the August 1st deadline is a sell the rumor, buy the news, event.