Crypto News

All eyes may be on Bitcoin (BTC), but it may be time to pay Ethereum (ETH) some heed. As the largest cryptocurrency has stagnated over the past number of weeks, ETH has somehow held strong, resulting in the ETH/BTC pair actually rallying higher for once.

Ethereum Price May Jet Higher

Popular trader Smokey recently took to Twitter to write that he predicts that “ETH will outperform BTC for the next couple week, maybe months,” drawing attention to charts of ETH/USD and ETH/BTC, which show attempts at breakouts.

Prediction:$ETH will outperform Bitcoin for the next couple weeks, maybe months pic.twitter.com/TtItd93cs7

— Smokey (@SmokeyXBT) November 17, 2019

That’s not all. As covered by this outlet last weekend, Crypto Thies posted a chart on Twitter that shows there is a confluence of bullish technical indicators signaling impending strength for ETH: his proprietary Market God signal flashed a one-day buy signal, which is something that has preceded strong surges higher in the past, and flashed a sell signal for the 12-hour Bitcoin dominance chart. This implies ETH will have some strength in the coming weeks.

The fundamentals, too, suggest strength for the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. On Thursday, Fortune revealed that Compound — a decentralized platform that allows users to lend out and borrow Ethereum-based assets like ETH itself, USD Coin, Basic Attention Token, and 0x — has secured a $25 million worth of investments from Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z (round leader), Paradigm, Bain Capital Ventures, and Polychain Capital.

Also, Ethereum’s Istanbul hard fork is slated to take place on December 4th, during the blockchain’s block 9069000. The Istanbul hard fork will introduce six key code changes to Ethereum.

One change is EIP 1884, which will “increase the computational costs of recalling data about the ethereum blockchain for application developers,” according to a CoinDesk report. The other changes are focused on changing gas/price limits for blockchain users.