The latest ETH price drop is the result of a market-wide correction as all the top twenty altcoins lost nearly 5-10%, taking overall market cap below $200 billion.
The cryptocurrency market entered a major correction on Monday, losing over $10 billion in market cap. Although the market correction is widespread across altcoins, all eyes are on Ethereum which has slipped below $200, yet again. At the press time, Ethereum is trading at $197.82, losing nearly 10% in the last 24-hours.
Last week on September 12, Ethereum hit its 2018-low at $170 with its market cap going below $20 billion. Most analysts predicted that the downfall was triggered by a severe decline in the ICO activity during the last few months. Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency fund of hedge funds BitBull Capital said:
“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.”
However, the second half of last week proved to be quite interesting as Ethereum gained 35% reaching a high of $228. A huge buying interest supported this price surge as the ETH daily trading volume achieved a new record in the last 12 months. Unfortunately, this could not last too long as the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency has pulled back below $200.
Ethereum is not the only digital currency facing the brunt of today’s market correction. Almost all of the top-twenty altcoins have lost on an average of 5-10%. Ethereum competitor and the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap – EOS – has also lost by nearly 10%. Other popular altcoins like Litecoin, Monero, Cardano, Dash and others have lost over 7%.
Ethereum Blockchain Development Leaps Ahead
Although ETH price movement remains disappointing so far throughout the year, developers continue their progress on its blockchain scalability. Last week at the ETH Berlin hackathon, blockchain researcher Vlad Zamfir unveiled a proof-of-concept for Sharding protocol.
Sharding is Ethereum’s second-layer scalability solution with a focus to reduce the burden of the Ethereum network. Although the code for proof-of-concept is currently under development, it sets a new premise for further progress on Sharding.
Also, earlier this month, senior blockchain developer at Rocket Pool – Danner Langley – unveiled the roadmap for Ethereum 2.0. In the roadmap, apart from scalability, Langley also focuses on other important issues of efficiency, sustainability, and flexibility. Langley explained all the important changes coming along with the Ethereum 2.0 like Proof-of-Stake (PoS), eWASM, and other.
Restructuring the entire infrastructure of the Ethereum network is certainly a big challenge for the developers. The Ethereum network is set for a Constantinople upgrade in the coming month. As a part of the shift of its consensus protocol to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Ethereum developers earlier announced their plans to reduce the block mining rewards to 2ETH, and postpone the ‘difficulty bomb’ further.
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