After Ethereum’s meteoric rise throughout the past few months, things are definitely heading in the opposite direction right now. Just when it seemed there would be a small window or reprieve, the price starts plummeting once again. Ether is definitely not a store of value right now, as it has more volatile tendencies compared to other major cryptocurrencies.
NO BREATHING ROOM FOR ETHEREUM JUST YET
The cryptocurrency market has not been kind to Ethereum lately. Ethereum’s price has taken a serious beating over the past few days. Even though its value is still well above the January 2017, most people only look at the recent price momentum back when ETH hit $400. Compared to that price, things are looking absolutely disastrous. However, it is always important to look at the bigger picture, which shows how Ether is still doing just fine.
That does not mean everything is going well for Ether either. The Ethereum price is going through a rough patch right now, where any gains are wiped off the books within an hour or two. Last night ETH was climbing back to $230, but that momentum did not last all that long. A second push toward that target was thwarted rather quickly as well. Earlier in the morning, Ether dipped back toward $210 before settling around the $213 mark.
What is next for Ether’s price? That question proves to be rather difficult to answer right now, since the entire cryptocurrency market is in a very unusual state right now. The overall market cap is seemingly rising slightly again, and it is now back to $85bn. Less than 24 hours ago, that number dropped well below $79bn. There are some wild fluctuations taking place right now, and that situation will not necessarily change anytime soon.
Ethereum trading markets are quite popular in Korea and China. The same goes for virtually all cryptocurrencies these days, including Bitcoin. Bithumb and Coinone are dominating in Korea, whereas OKCoin.cn is clearly the leading market for CNY trading. The Poloniex ETH/BTC market is also generating well above $100m worth of 24-hour volume. Ethereum has strong trading volume right now, even though it seems to put negative pressure on the market.
Despite Ethereum’s price somewhat stabilizing right now, its network issues have not been resolved. Network congestion can still take place at any given moment, and the number of cryptocurrency ICOS potentially clogging up the network is not going down either. These are growing pains the community has to deal with and they can only hope the developers successfully address the scaling issues sooner rather than later.
It will be interesting to see where things go from here for Ethereum. There is a lot of positive momentum among the community, but it is still a market dominated b whales and other large-scale investors. Any cryptocurrency market can go up or down in a matter of minutes without a clear reason to explain the price momentum. For Ethereum, it is unclear which direction is on the horizon, but there will be a fair amount of volatility to deal with in the coming weeks.