Ethereum still tries to come out of the two-year bearish stance against Bitcoin’s runner-up. Since the massive crypto run in late 2017 and the first days of 2018, Ethereum lost nearly 88% of its all-time high, to trade at $163.65 as of press time.
Strangely, as the other big players ended the year with a higher price than at the beginning of 2019, Ethereum went lethargic and finished last year with a seven percent price decrease compared to its price from January 1st, 2019.
However, 2020 started promising for the entire crypto sector, as some currencies managed to double in price, while others received a substantial push toward higher grounds. Ethereum secured a 23% increase in its price since the start of 2020, with most of the increase accumulated in the past couple of days. Ethereum found a strong support zone in the $160 region, as the market corrected Ethereum’s gains to lower levels.
Trading experts saw the 50-day moving average to turn positive in the first days of 2020, so they expect, if the bullish stance on Ethereum continues, to result in a Golden cross, which is a sign of a further bullish trend. The other marker crypto traders watch for is the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD). The indicator measures and follows directions and momentum, giving correlation to two moving averages of any asset’s price. Trustnodes observed the weekly MACD histogram and found out Ethereum made the first bullish weekly MACD since the sub-$100 lows of December 2018.
If the bullish run continues, the next major obstacle for Ethereum’s price would be the $185 resistance zone. In fact, ETH stayed two whole months just beneath that value. Short-term resistance levels are set at around $170, which was Ethereum’s price peak from January 15th.
On the other hand, the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market could give Ethereum the much-needed push, if the #2 crypto manages to overcome the resistance zones. According to defipulse.com, the vast majority of DeFi applications still rely on Bitcoin and the ERC-20 protocol. The number of Ethereum tokens locked for DeFi usage exceeds 3 million, which results in a little less than 3% of the total Ethereum supply.
However, 2020 may be the most crucial year for Ethereum, as the community prepares for a core change in ETH’s algorithms – ETH 2.0. Basically, the Ethereum blockchain would evolve, providing users with a reward for staking their tokens and earning an interest rate. The staked tokens would serve as computing power provision, as there will be no more Ethereum mining. The migration to Ethereum 2.0 will put massive stress on Ethereum, as most of the decentralized applications (dApps) run on Ethereum’s blockchain.
Furthermore, the migration would reshape the industry, according to Binance. The leading crypto exchange published a research piece, stating that Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms would be beneficial for the entire list of PoS blockchains – EOS, Stellar, TRON, Cardano, Dash, Cosmos, Tezos, Neo, and Ontology. Combined together, the PoS sector would result in 10% of the total market capitalization, which settled at $237 billion, as of press time.