With all of Bitcoin’s bad press, is the time right for Ethereum to take the crown?
Ether’s market cap has reduced by more than 50% since hitting its all-time high value last month, but experts aren’t worried.
- Experts believe once this ongoing bearish pressure subsides, Ether will once again commence on its path of monetary ascent.
- Despite its ongoing financial woes, ETH has still been able to deliver year-to-date profits in excess of 300%.
- Along with Ether, almost all of the other altcoins in the top 30 are currently in the red.
The global crypto industry had been buzzing over the past month or so, especially as Ether continued to scale to new all-time high values seemingly every other day. That said, since yesterday, the premier altcoin has continued to stay around the $2,500 mark and is showcasing weekly losses in excess of 40%. At the time of writing, ETH is trading at $2,539.
Expounding his views on Ether’s ongoing market drought, Sidney Powell, CEO and cofounder of Maple Finance, a capital-efficient corporate debt marketplace, told Finder that while ETH continues to fall, the currency is still showcasing year-to-date profits in excess of 300%, adding that although Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s comments regarding the crypto market haven’t helped matters, it would be juvenile to attribute this recent fall to a series of tweets.
“Once a downturn starts, collateral liquidations can send prices into a death spiral before weak hands get shaken out. This highlights the vulnerability that crypto native institutions borrowing overcollateralized from CeFi lenders face,” Powell said.
However, Powell is fairly confident that as more and more people continue to enter the DeFi sector, these volatility levels may start to subside. “We’ve barely scratched the surface in DeFi so far,” he added.
A similar outlook is shared by Steve Gregory, CEO of Currency Com US LLC, the US subsidiary of Currency.com, who believes that while many investors continue to pull their hair out over Ether’s current negative price action, there’s a real chance the premier altcoin may actually “flip” Bitcoin in the future.
“With the Ethereum upgrades and the second coming of DeFi summer, this market looks different in many ways than we have seen previously. There is a real possibility of a ‘flippening.’ The total value locked in DeFi could also flip Bitcoin’s market cap,” Gregory said.
Ether’s market cap plummets by more than 50%
Over the course of the weekend, Ethereum, along with a host of other major altcoins, proceeded to dip sharply, causing more than $1 trillion worth of assets to be liquidated from the market.
ETH too dipped below $2,000 for only the second time in more than a month and a half, slipping to a new relative low, albeit briefly. As a result of this negative price action, Ether is trading at less than 50% of its all-time high value, which it scaled up to earlier this month.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
