The cryptocurrency market has lost over $200 billion in the last few days, with the market cap now below $1 trillion.

Mike Novogratz, the founder and chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd., believes that the cryptocurrency market is closer to the bottom than stocks. He made this statement during a recent interview with Bloomberg.

Cryptocurrencies and stocks have been underperforming since the start of the year. Most cryptocurrencies have erased the gains they accumulated in 2021 and are trading at their 2020 levels.

Bitcoin is trading around $22k after losing more than 22% of its value in the last 24 hours. If the bearish trend continues, Bitcoin could trade around the $20k mark for the first time in more than a year.

Ether dropped as much as 21% to $1,165 on Monday. Bitcoin has lost 67% of its value while Ether is down by 74% since hitting record highs in early November.

However, Novogratz said cryptocurrencies are closer to the bottom than stocks. He said;

“Ethereum should hold around $1,000, and it’s $1,200 right now. Bitcoin is around $20,000, $21,000, and it is $23,000, so you are much closer to the bottom in crypto than you are where I think, stocks, are going to have another 15% to 20%. “Until I see the Fed flinch, until I really think, OK the economy is so bad, and the Fed is going to have to stop hiking and even think about cutting, I don’t think it is time to really deploy lots of capital.”

Some market experts attributed the recent market crash to Celsius’s withdrawal pausing policy issued on Monday. However, the cryptocurrency market began to record losses since Friday.

The rising inflation levels continue to affect the cryptocurrency and stock markets. The total cryptocurrency market cap has dropped below $1 trillion, down from the all-time high of $3 trillion recorded in November 2021. 

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Like most major coins in the market, Ethereum has seen a massive sell-off over the last week or so. The coin is down about 30%, and as sentiment in the market takes a risk-averse approach, this decline is far from over. So, where does ETH go from here? More analysis later in the post but first, check out these highlights:

• ETH has fallen below $1300 for the first in 18 months

• A fall below $1,000 is likely and could trigger a huge sell-off

• Momentum in the market appears very limited, and ETH will remain suppressed.

Data Source: TradingView

Where does Ethereum go now?

At the moment, there isn’t a lot of good news coming from crypto. As most coins sell-off, we do not see any signs that the downtrend will ease. If anything, this could be the beginning of a very difficult period for crypto in the near term. So, we expect ETH to continue sliding. 

There will be some fake-outs in between where the coin rallies a bit. But overall, the trend will push downwards. It will be very interesting though to see the kind of resilience ETH shows at $1000. Losing $1000 will be a huge setback for the coin, and bulls must defend this price at all costs.

Nonetheless, if ETH can reclaim the $1300 support in the coming days, perhaps a massive met down will be avoided. So far, the coin is down 15% over the last 24 hours.

Is the crypto bull run over?

When major coins like ETH start to fall sharply, they often weigh down the whole market. 2021 was one of the best years for crypto. But it is now clear that 2022 will be the year of corrections. 

ETH is likely going to face more pressure but could still close the year above $5000. It all depends on how investor sentiment develops in the coming weeks.

The post Ethereum falls by over 30% in less than a week – What next? appeared first on CoinJournal.

Ugh. Not a good couple of weeks for Ethereum investors, as the DeFi King has dipped down below $1700, now trading 55% below its open of $3722 back on New Year’s Day.

BTC Dominates

Of further concern for fans of Vitalik’s creation will be the underperformance against Bitcoin over the last month or so. While the market as a whole has plummeted amid the macro sentiment and fallout from the Terra circus, there have at least been small relief rallies over the last few days for Bitcoin. Ethereum, on the other hand, has been pretty much constantly dropping.

The chart below shows it performance against Bitcoin. ETH strongly outperformed BTC through 2020 and 2021, as the bull market raged and ETH leveraged its higher volatility and smaller market cap. However, as the market has turned this year, we have seen BTC re-assert its dominance over all things crypto, as has historically been the case in pullback periods.

Additional Problems

Digging into the fundamentals here throws up factors for ETH’s decline beyond simply the bloodbath taking place across the board. That is the fabled Merge, which has been promised, postponed and re-promised for as long as crypto enthusiasts can remember. At this point, the Merge triggers traumatic memories in my mind of lockdown back home in Ireland.

I think we had five lockdowns total, ranging from three weeks to 6 months long. Each one brought promises that it was the last, but they simply kept on coming, thick and fast. 8 PM curfews, 2KM perimeters around one’s house, exercise quotas and more, it was a constant kick-the-can-down-the-road exercise as our government repeatedly fell short of its own targets and failed to plan accordingly.

While the ETH Merge is still seemingly slated for August, last week was a reminder that it is far from set in stone, as it hit a stumbling block when the Beacon Chain went through a seven-block reorganisation (or reorg) last week.  To be exact, seven blocks from number 3,887,075 to 3,887,081 were knocked out of the Beacon Chain between 08:55:23 and 08:56:35 AM UTC.

To translate this into non-computer whizz speak, a reorg is the name given to an event when a block that was part of the main chain (the canonical chain) gets knocked off due to a competing block beating it out. Typically, this can occur via either a malicious attack or a bug.

The Ethereum beacon chain experienced a 7-block deep reorg ~2.5h ago. This shows that the current attestation strategy of nodes should be reconsidered to hopefully result in a more stable chain! (proposals already exist) pic.twitter.com/BkQrKuUlw1

— Martin Köppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann) May 25, 2022

Ethereum developer Preston Van Loon suggested that in this instance it happened due to a “non-trivial segmentation” of new and old client node software, ruling out any malice. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin declared his theory a “good hypothesis.”

This, unfortunately, shows that the analysis by @gakonst and @VitalikButerin here was too optimistic when the article claimed re-org stability will improve in POS over POW.
We have not seen 7 block reorgs on Ethereum mainnet in years.https://t.co/G5g8acG3L8 pic.twitter.com/AvZ6ygZRxs

— Martin Köppelmann 🇺🇦 (@koeppelmann) May 25, 2022

My Thoughts

This is a hiccup but nothing to be concerned about in the long-term. However, it certainly hammered home how tenuous the slated August timeline. While many have long since given up on predicting the timing of this elusive overhaul, the enormity and scale of the project has certainly been underestimated by the cryptocurrency community.

The latest dip in Ethereum – it wobbled significantly last week while Bitcoin trudged along just fine – can likely be attributed to this extra doubt over the roadmap. With the upgrade largely priced in for August, and the market uber-sensitive right now as investors simply try to survive, news like this will always trigger selling.

With sentiment worse in the wider market than at any point post the GFC, and cryptocurrency facing all sorts of difficult questions in the aftermath of the Terra implosion, the space simply needs Ethereum to hold up its end of the bargain and pull through with a successful Merge.

I believe we are still on course for that in August – with the Ropsten testnet merge providing some good news earlier today, one of the deciding events before application to the mainnet. But then again, I believed lockdown would last three weeks, and I ended up spending so much time in my bedroom over the last two years that I forgot what the sky looked like.

Let’s hope I’m not repeating my past mistakes here.

The post Ethereum Merge reminding me of COVID lockdowns appeared first on CoinJournal.

Ethereum (ETH) has managed to see some strong recovery this week. The coin has finally risen above $1900, and there could still be more upside to further test $2000. But how far can the bulls keep the momentum going? Turns out not that long. Here are key highlights:

• Ethereum has gained around 7% over the last 24 hours.

• The coin is consolidating the price above $1900.

• A decisive run towards $2000 is possible in the days ahead.

Data Source: TradingView 

Ethereum’s recovery and its limits

The fact that ETH has managed to hit $1900 is a very good sign. It means that the downtrend we saw last week has reversed or at least stopped for now. If the coin can manage to close the day above this price, then you should expect a decent upward rally. 

It is likely though, that ETH will face major resistance at $2000. However, we expect bulls to just have enough in their tank to overcome. Once the coin rises above $2000, it will trigger a decent demand that will push it towards around $2300. This will be a rise of 21% from the current price. 

But if ETH fails to hold $1900, we may see more weakness follow. However, at the moment downside risks are not that big. At worse, ETH will likely bottom at $1700, where it has found very strong support in recent days. We are also seeing large accounts buy more ETH. This is a sign that the long-term prospects for the coin are quite positive.

Why Ethereum could grow this year

It is unlikely that Ethereum will hit the $10,000 price that we all expected at the start of the year. But the coin still has so much left to give.

At the moment, conservative estimates could push ETH to $6000 by the end of the year. That will be around 3x growth in 2022.

The post Ethereum (ETH) rebounds to hit $1900 – Can it keep going? appeared first on CoinJournal.

Ethereum (ETH) price has experienced a sharp drop as stability doubts immerge as Ethereum blockchain proof-of-stake (PoS) merge approaches.

At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $1,853.44, down 5.78% after pulling back from a daily high of $1,976.57. 

The Ethereum Beacon chain that was to introduce PoS into the blockchain went through a 7-block deep reorganization in the past 24 hours.

Block reorganization happens when there is an inconsistency in the order of blocks which mainly happens as a result of malicious activities or a bug.

The block reorganization in the Ethereum was a result of a bug that showed that the Ethereum shift to PoS might not be stable as advocated by Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder.

Ethereum stability doubt

Although the recent reorganization was limited, the Ethereum developers are still trying to establish the cause, so far, they confirmed that the blockchain was not attacked.

Gnosis founder, Martin Koppelmann, noted that Buterin might have been too optimistic that the reorganization stability will improve if Ethereum will shift to PoS.

Koppelmann said:

‘’We have not seen 7 block reorgs on Ethereum mainnet in years.’’

However, he complimented the Ethereum community for acting so fast on finding the cause and the solution to this issue.

Besides, the blockchain shift PoS is anticipated to happen this year in order to increase blockchain accessibility. Buterin expects the shift to take place by August 2022.

The future of Ethereum markets

With the expiry of some option contracts happening this week, the Ethereum futures market seems to be on shaky ground. 

In the last 12 hours, the token has experienced a sizeable amount of liquidations, about $118 million which is twice that of Bitcoin. Almost 97% of these were long positions which shows that traders were ready for the Ethereum recovery.

However, the expected recovery has not yet happened since ETH has been lagging in the crypto market. Its losses were sparked after the Federal Reserve meeting that showed that some Central bank officials suggested further interest rate hikes this year

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