Ethereum Price Prediction as Market Cap Hits $200 Billion: What's Next for ETH?

cryptonews.com:

Ether (ETH), the cryptocurrency that powers the layer-1 smart-contract-enabled Ethereum blockchain, is rising in tandem with the broader crypto market on Monday and was last up around 3% over the past 24 hours, as per CoinGecko.

The cryptocurrency’s latest rally has seen it reclaim a market cap of $200 billion, with the ETH price last around $1,680, more than 10% up from earlier monthly lows.

Ether is the second most valuable cryptocurrency in the world next to Bitcoin (BTC), which has a market cap of nearly three times as much at just over $600 billion.

Ethereum remains by far the most widely used and trusted smart-contract-enabled blockchain in the crypto space.

Its dominance is emphasized by its 68% share of the total value of all cryptocurrency locked into smart contracts, or trade value locked (TVL), as per DeFi Llama.

While Ether has been rallying as of late in tandem with the broader market amid optimism about upcoming spot Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) approvals in the US, ETH remains a big relative underperformer when compared to Bitcoin, both this year and in recent weeks.

Where Bitcoin is up around 16% in the last 30 days and nearly 80% this year, Ether is up a more modest 6% in the past 30 days, and a much more conservative 34% this year.

This divergence in performance could partially be explained by Bitcoin-specific fundamentals, like optimism about upcoming spot Bitcoin ETFs, the fact that Bitcoin appears to be the safest cryptocurrency from regulatory risk (no major regulators are trying to claim it’s a security), and general safe-haven demand for Bitcoin.

But some of Ether’s relative weakness can likely be explained by “weak” fundamentals relating to the cryptocurrency.

For instance, demand for the recently