Ether climbs to new all-time highs while Bitcoin remains in a lateralization phase. For the first time since August 2018, Ether is approaching a price of 0.05 BTC.
Ether (ETH), the second cryptocurrency by market capitalization behind Bitcoin (BTC), reached a new all-time high of USD 2,580, according to CoinMarketCap. The price of Ether in Bitcoin has increased by almost 18% in the last week and is now at 0.04687 BTC. The cryptocurrency had not seen that level since mid-August 2018.
The previous all-time high of Ether, USD 2,544, had taken place last April 15th, so the new high represents just a 1.73% appreciation. However, the positioning of Ether against Bitcoin has improved by a factor of 10, regarding the price, in the last week.
The price of Ether evolved in both US dollars and Bitcoin BTC since 2016 and the last week. On the one hand, it is possible to see that the price of Ether against Bitcoin recently reached a local high of 0.046803 BTC. However, this is still a third of the all-time high of 0.13712 BTC that it reached on June 15th, 2017.
The Ether Bullish Momentum Is Gaining Strength
Investor Raoul Pal comments on an ETH/BTC chart, highlighting that it shows a valley between 2018 and today. That could suggest an upcoming bullish momentum for Ether expressed in Bitcoin.
“Honestly, I look at the ETH/BTC chart and I see a huge rounded valley with great potential for an upward breakout,” Pal says on Twitter. The investor notes that, when assigning the price related to NFT tokens or community tokens on DeFi platforms, that price is in Ether. “Ether is rapidly becoming the currency of the digital world and Bitcoin is the pristine collateral and base layer,” says Pal.
Pal uses a graph showing the annual growth of Ethereum addresses since July 2018 to support his argument in favor of Ether’s momentum.
According to the graph, the growth of Ether addresses has been at positive levels for a year and currently shows a level close to 75%.
When the activation of the Berlin fork on Ethereum successfully occurred, the aforementioned previous all-time high for Ether took place. There were some synchronization delays due to failures of the OpenEthereum client in approximately 15% of the nodes. However, the solution to this problem arrived in a few hours.
What Happened Exactly After the Activation of the Berlin Hard Fork
After the Berlin hard fork, the nodes were not synchronizing with the Ethereum Blockchain. In other words, anyone running that client, 12% of all Ethereum nodes, were not able to use the Blockchain until the correction of the error occurred.
The problem caused a crash in the Etherscan block explorer but it seems to have only affected the OpenEthereum nodes. Geth, the most used Ethereum client, was working correctly. The problem may have been due to a transaction related to a smart contract not existing yet.
As a consequence of the event, Coinbase halted Ether and ERC-20 withdrawals. However, the exchange subsequently reactivated these transactions.
By Alexander Salazar
