By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 16th, 2024
The price of Ethereum (ETH) has significantly underperformed the overall crypto market, dropping more than 60% since the beginning of September.
Over the past few weeks, investors of Ethereum have seen a significant drop in the price of the currency. Recently, it has plunged to establish a new low under $200.
The situation has provoked numerous discussions, many cryptocurrency analysts and investors have been trying to explain such phenomenon. A crypto researcher Kevin Rooke on his Twitter account explained that there is a connection between ETH price and ICOs.
ICOs have spent over $30 million worth of ETH this week (153,500 ETH).
This is more than any week since March 2018.
The scary part? These ICOs still have over $600,000,000 worth of treasury ETH in their accounts (3,000,000+ ETH).
Will they sell? Will they hold? 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/DlGGziEBAZ
— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) September 11, 2018
Last week, ICOs spent over $30 million (or 153,500 Ethereum). It can be assumed that a majority of the 153,500 ETH were sold on spot market exchanges. Currently, there are roughly 202,000 ETH sold, which is equal to $40 million.
As Rooke said, ICOs still have over $600 million worth of Ethereum in their accounts, and this is a “scary part.”
On August 23, the same comments were made by a crypto expert Alex Krüger:
According to @santimentfeed's database, ICOs for which their Ethereum wallets are known have a visible balance of ETH 3.3 million, or $900 million at current prices. ETH 135K were transferred out / spent in the last 30 days (about 4%). #ICO
— Alex Krüger (@krugermacro) August 24, 2018
Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency fund of hedge funds BitBull Capital, has the same opinion:
“Ether’s price was inflated earlier due to the ICO mania. As people pledged Ether with ICOs, the supply-demand equation got skewed — now ICOs have cooled down, and hence the setback.”
Some experts explain the recent fallout in another way. Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York’s Stern School of Business and a famous economist, believes that most DApps on the platform are scammy pyramid schemes and casino games, and the rest of the applications are DEXs, which “no one uses as 99% of transactions are on centralized exchanges.”
No wonder Ethereum is collapsing. 75% of DApps are crypto-kitties, scammy Ponzi pyramid schemes & Casino games. The other 25% are DEX that no one uses as 99% of transactions are on centralized exchanges. & 99% of crypto-currencies have already lost 99% of their value. Meltdown!
— Nouriel Roubini (@Nouriel) September 9, 2018
Some point to Bitmex’s introduction of the ETH, which allows shorts with up to 100x leverage.
$ETH now -57% since launching on Bitmex in just over 1 month. pic.twitter.com/jfW4TCYcEE
— ₿-Eazy 💥 (@cryptoeazy) September 9, 2018
Investor enthusiasm for Ethereum is fading. However, it doesn’t influence Bitcoin’s dominance. Its weakest market position was on June 19 of last year, when Ethereum grabbed 30.63% of the market to Bitcoin’s 37.87%. Ripple was third with 9.6%, followed by litecoin at 2.25%. Since then, Bitcoin managed to regain market dominance of 65.18% by December, when its price was at record highs, while Ethereum was the second at 9.71%. Ethereum was able to close the gap on February 5, 2018, grabbing 20.46% to Bitcoin’s 36.32%, but by the end of March, Bitcoin regained a 45.02% dominance to Ethereum’s 14.63%. Ethereum fought back to 17.25% by May 5 to Bitcoin’s 36.0%, but, since then, Bitcoin has steadily dominated the market.
Yesterday, Bitcoin jumping from $6,190 to $6,450. The currency has recently demonstrated stability in the $6,300 to $6,400 range and has posted decent volume at nearly $3.8 billion. Bitcoin’s current price is $6,281.74.
Despite continuous falling, Ethereum is going on struggling. There is still hope, that Ethereum’s diminishing returns could potentially be rectified once the highly anticipated institutional money are used in the right way.