ETH nears $4K
What's being bought and sold*
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*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 8th March 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
Bitcoin Sideways; Ethereum Nears Milestone; Memecoins Leaping
Prior to the past 72 hours, Bitcoin proved an unstoppable force. Now it just inches along unassumingly in a yawn-chain-inducing (yawn) sideways range of $67K-$68K.
Nevertheless, BTC enters the weekend with a $70,000 spot price directly in its scope. North of $70K remains a gaudy target and is not to be taken for granted, even with exchange volume hitting new record heights.
Although we're going to go ahead and assume Ethereum right now is in the midst of crossing $4,000 for the first time in 29 months. When we checked ETH Friday at 7:52 a.m. (EST), the second-biggest crypto was $3,950 following a 24-hour increase of 4.5%, per CoinGecko.
Memecoins, particularly PEPE and FLOKI, are going bonkers. That latter quirky, popular digital asset soared 50% in 24 hours.
BONK, for its part, didn’t exactly flip out. But it did gain 14% overnight.
What's down
Large-Cap AI-Sector Names Falter
AI coins are in the red after greening up yesterday. Fetch.ai, for example, spent the seventh day of March traveling from $2.60 to almost $2.80. But FET, at last check this morning, sat close to $2.50.
FET fell 6% over the past day. Another AI peer, SingularityNET (AGIX), has shed 5.5%.
These coins and some others (RNDR and WLD, to name two more) have indeed participated in a narrative rally but may now be vulnerable to a sub-sector rotation play – unless it's some kind of deep fake. RNDR as of early Friday was actually shading green.
What's next
Bitwise Analyst Shouts It From The Rooftop, Baby, ETH’s Ready To Go
When we checked Ethereum at 8:15 a.m. (EST), it was $3,960. If there is any resistance lurking, it'll need to show itself soon, otherwise ETH is set to topple the psychologically important $4,000 barrier.
Awaiting crypto’s second-largest standard bearer after that, according to Bitwise researcher Juan Leon, are spot price levels never before seen, as in much higher than ETH’s record high of roughly $4,900.
"Ethereum could very well go above $8,000, or $10,000, this year, maybe even higher," Leon told CoinDesk. "Bitcoin has sucked up all the attention with the ETFs launching, but ETH has major catalysts coming into focus."
One of them is the Ethereum network's Dencun upgrade, which is set for next week and expected to make it less expensive to transact via layer-2 platforms. Most of the related residual positive sentiment will happen weeks and months after the upgrade as the effects take place, Leon explained.
Leon's bullish ETH forecast is also mindful of spot ETFs possibly launching later this spring, and thus potentially unleashing a deluge of retail and institutional money, triggering, conceivably, a virtuous cycle of ETH demand.
The nine newly launched spot BTC funds have amassed $9 billion in net inflows in two months.
Bitwise’s Leon gave spot ETH ETFs a roughly 50% chance for approval.
