Observation | Ethereum is close to its historical high again and the market outlook remains strong

On January 19, the price of Ethereum is closely chasing its all-time high, while the price of Bitcoin continues to move sideways.

JPMorgan analyst Nikolas Panigirtzoglou believes that “unless Bitcoin can break through $40,000, it may lose its appeal in the short term. In the next few days or weeks, the inflow of funds to the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust may need to maintain a rate of $100 million per day so that Bitcoin can break through $40,000.”

Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, believes that Ethereum has a very strong catalyst this year.

“1. Fully prepare Rollup by the end of Q1, making the Ethereum network high throughput and cheap. 2. Ethereum is in a deflationary state due to the fee burning involved in the Berlin fork, which is likely to occur in Q3-Q4. 3. The overall strength of DeFi on the Ethereum network, and the upcoming V2/V3 protocol versions (UNI, SNX, YFI, Sushi, Curve) on the Ethereum network. In addition, Rollups (and their success) will consolidate the ETH2.0 roadmap and shorten it to Phase 1.”

Multiple data show that the Ethereum market is steadily improving.

As of 10:00 today, the total locked value of DeFi protocols on Ethereum is approximately US$35.36 billion, up 1.49% from the previous month. The top three protocols in terms of locked value are Maker with US$4.203 billion, WBTC with US$4.111 billion, and Uniswap V2 with US$3.403 billion.

As of 13:50 today, the current Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract address has received 2.6002 million ETH, accounting for 2.27% of the current supply of Ethereum. The mortgage contract balance has increased by 36,192 ETH in the past 24 hours.

According to Messari statistics, the average daily settlement amount of the Ethereum network in the past month exceeded US$12.3 billion, setting a new high in the past year. At the same time, the average daily settlement amount of the Bitcoin network in the past month was about US$9.3 billion.

Glassnode data shows that the number of Ethereum non-zero wallet addresses and wallet addresses holding 0.01 and 0.1 ETH has risen significantly. Non-zero wallets have been gradually increasing since 2018 and recently broke through 50 million. The new high is nearly 52.5 million. There are more than 11 million addresses holding at least 0.01 ETH. The growth of this type of wallet began to pick up in late 2020 - just when the price of ETH began to soar. Finally, the number of addresses holding at least 0.1 ETH also reached a new high of over 3.715 million. The growth of this type of wallet slowed down briefly a few months ago, but began to grow as the price of ETH rebounded.

ETH non-zero addresses. Source: Glassnode

Dong Ge, a famous Weibo user, said that today's market has been rising all the way. Although the increase in Bitcoin is not large, the increase in Ethereum is still considerable. The situation in recent times is unusually similar. When Bitcoin is sideways, other mainstream currencies are flying together. The rotation effect makes the market continue to rise. There are reports that Ethereum will continue to pull up to four or five thousand US dollars. The specific situation still needs to be observed, but Ethereum is indeed relatively strong this year. At the same time, the popularity of DeFi is also causing a series of currencies to continue to rise.