Ethereum (ETH) is the second most popular cryptocurrency (also the second biggest one in terms of its market cap). It was launched during the Ethereum initial coin offering (ICO) in late 2014 by Vitalik Buterin and a group of other developers.
Since then, Ethereum has become the launchpad for other blockchains with their own coins, the very first platform that began to deploy smart contracts and then also NFTs and decentralized financial applications (DeFi dapps). Ethereum has seen many blockchains built on it with some of them long forgotten now and some having moved to their own mainnets – Tron, EOS, Binance Chain, Arbitrum, Shiba Inu, Worldcoin, etc.
Hence, ETH attracts a lot of attention and is a popular trading asset which continues to release major updates.
Ethereum Duncan 2024 update
This year, Ethereum developers launched one of the biggest upgrades in its history (and a very important one too) titled Duncan. It was launched on March 13 and consisted of nine improvement proposals implemented by developer teams on this chain.
Dencun allowed the developers to finally integrate the feature known as Proto-Danksharding. The goal is a further improvement of Ethereum scalability and throughput. This innovation is expected to largely increase Ethereum adoption and to attract more DeFi startups to start building their products on it. Higher and wider adoption theoretically means that a coin’s price is likely to increase and reach unprecedented highs.
Dencun is a solution to the big issue Ethereum has had for a long time – congestion, since a lot of blockchains are built and operate on top of it, so there are more transactions, the lower the throughput gets and the higher the gas fees on it surge.
Now, Dencun with its Proto-Danksharding is expected to solve this issue once and for all and greatly reduce transaction fees on it. Lower gas fees is another positive factor that is likely to attract more users to Ethereum.
Dencun was one of the upgrades made recently that brought Ethereum closer to its new Ethereum 2.0 version. It started with launch of the Beacon Chain in December 2020, when ETH validators were allowed to move their ETH into the deposit contract as part of the preparation to transition the second largest blockchain into the new 2.0 phase and switch it from the energy-consuming proof-of-work consensus algorithm to the proof-of-stake one.
The first upgrade was called The Merge and it happened in September 2022. The Merge completed the long-planned shift of Ethereum from the energy-consuming and anti-environmental proof-of-work algorithm to the proof-of-stake one. Ethereum began greener and that was partly why the price was expected to skyrocket after that.
In April 2023, another important upgrade followed – Shapella. It consisted of two smaller ones called Shanghai and Capella. When that happened, users finally were able to withdraw their ETH from various staking pools on cryptocurrency exchanges. Dencun included two smaller updates – Cancun and Deneb. Dencun was also part of a bigger upgrade as well, it is called The Surge. It will also include The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge to finish it off. They are all scheduled to take place this year.
Spot Ethereum ETFs awaiting SEC decision
After the US regulatory body the SEC gave the green light to spot-based Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the middle of January and they rushed off to trade at once, several of those issuers filed applications to launch similar products based on Ethereum. Among them was the maker of the largest Bitcoin ETF BlackRock and Grayscale, who wanted to convert its Ethereum Trust into a spot ETF as it had succeeded in doing with its Bitcoin Trust already.
The regulator has already delayed its decision on several spot ETH ETF proposals – from Invesco Galaxy, Franklin Templeton and Grayscale. Analysts now expect that the same fate will befall Ark Invest and VanEck later in May.
ETH at $4,000 by the end of 2024?
In the meantime, while Grayscale has withdrawn its filing for Ethereum futures ETF, the company remains optimistic that the SEC will finally do the right thing and approve these filings. Many analysts from the start of the year have been expecting that SEC’s approval of Ethereum spot ETFs will take many months, since it did so in the case of spot Bitcoin funds.
After the Bitcoin ETFs got approved, they started purchasing roughly 10,000 BTC per day from the market before the halving occurred, thus creating a demand shock. Many traders and financial experts believe that once Ethereum products get the green light, ETFs will begin to suck up Ethereum from exchanges as well, thus driving the coin’s price upward to new highs.
Should the approval happen this year, ETH is likely to start rising. Besides, the largest altcoin has always been pegged to Bitcoin price movements. If the world’s primary crypto finally gains momentum expected after the halving, it will begin going up, pulling Ethereum along.
Currently, Ethereum is trading slightly above $3,000 with a market cap of $361,409,722,926. Experts believe that by the end of 2024, ETH has high odds of recovering the $4,000 price mark. However, whether a new all-time high will be reached remains to be seen. The previous ETH price record of $4,891 was set in November 2021, following Bitcoin’s ATH.
