Ethereum is experiencing a bearish market with the price plunging today below the $200 mark with no end in sight as yet. It had dropped down through the $300 level earlier in the month.
Reasons for Ether’s drastic drop
Mike McGlone, a commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence claimed that Ether the coin associated with Ethereum could drop even further to the support target of $155.
Ethereum was once an innovative product that aided developers create new and functional blockchain applications. However ethereum now faces huge competition. As the cryptocoin market grew now Ethereum competes for investor interest with 1,926 different coins trading on 13,731 pairs who are challenging what was once Ethereum territory.
Challengers to Ethereum have included EOS launched in June of this year officially, and NEO which is targeting large scale enterprises. Others are Cardano, Aeterenity, ICON, Lisk, Stratis and Waves.
In addition to all the new competition, Ethereum has suffered as startups paid in ether (ETH) in their initial coin offering (ICO) cashed out to cover expenses.
Some of the negative narratives may be created by Etherium’s competitors according to CEO and co-founder of the blockchain power network Ambrosus, Angel Versetti. He said that Ethereum had been proven to work well compared to its competing newer blockchains. Versetti said: “There are more stakeholders with concentrated power (or large stake of holdings of coins) among other altcoins, who are promoting a narrative that Ethereum’s competitors are better and stronger. It’s important to bear in mind, however, that these predictions are not based on fact, and are merely speculative in nature.”
Matthew Newton, a market assistant at Toro said that although there have been errors found in Ethereum that there was also a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) being spread about the death of ether and this may be contributing to an emotional sell off of the coin.
Lack of main stream adoption of decentralized applications (dApp) may also be hurting prices as Ethereum faces a massive crisis in investor confidence.
Some good news
The Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) that launched bitcoin futures last December is awaiting the green light from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to launch Etherium options by the end of this year. The CBOE will use the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange market, the same base it is already using for bitcoin futures.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has declared last June that ethereum is not classed as a security so the path ahead appears to be already paved for the launch of Ether (ETH) futures. At the time, the CBOE president said: “We are pleased with the SEC’s decision to provide clarity with respect to current Ether transactions. This announcement clears a key stumbling block for Ether futures, the case for which we’ve been considering since we launched the first Bitcoin futures in December 2017.”
CBOE sees ether as one of the more liquid crypto coins making it suitable for futures trading. Ether is the second largest cryptocoin by market cap, bitcoin being the largest. The CEO of CBOE says there is significant demand for Ether futures.
Present situation
It is now September 9 UTC. Yesterday, September 8 at 21:35 UTC time, Ethereum was down at $193. It closed up a little bit at $197. With the day just starting the price hit a high of $1.98 but perhaps it will go up above the two hundred mark a bit later today. There is no sign of a retreat to the support level of $155 a good sign. The present price of Ethereum can be found here.
