Ethereum price continues to defend its dominance despite painfully high fees
Over the past week, ETH has been able to rake in modest gains of just 2%.
- Ethereum's market dominance index (DI) has increased to 18.5%.
- Gas fee issues continue to plague the altcoin, with transaction fees currently hovering around AUD$70.
- A growing number of exchanges including Binance, Coinbase, and FTX have either released or plan on launching their very own NFT marketplaces.
After dipping as low as AUD$6,160 yesterday, Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalisation, has proceeded to book 24-hour profits in excess of 4.5%. At press time, ETH is trading at a price point of $6,435.
Ethereum has been mirroring Bitcoin's performance recently with many analysts believing that a short-term price target of AUD$6,800 (US$5,000) may be on the cards for the digital asset.
Furthermore, the altcoin has been hitting new all-time highs over the past month despite its native gas fee levels continuing to hover at relative highs of approximately AUD$70. Not only that, ETH has continued to remain the project of choice for a vast majority of DeFi enthusiasts globally, with US$93 billion of the US$115 billion locked into various DeFi offerings being placed in ETH projects.
Recently, MyEtherWallet (MEW) revealed that it had released its first nonfungible token (NFT) collection, labelled ETH Blocks, making tokenised images of individual blocks on the Ethereum blockchain available to its clients. A fair few blocks have already been sold, with more NFTs of major block happenings (such as completion milestones, network upgrades, hard forks) still up for grabs.
As Coinbase prepares to roll out its upcoming NFT platform, company CEO Brian Armstrong recently spoke with a prominent media outlet, claiming that while BTC and ETH (as well as some other major cryptocurrencies) continue to attract a bulk of attention associated with this space, NFTs will one day become of equal importance to the industry, adding: "We are very excited about NFTs, this is going to be a very large area for crypto in the future, and it already is today."
Alongside Coinbase, Sam Bankman-Fried-led cryptocurrency exchange FTX too recently launched its very own NFT ecosystem. Similarly, earlier this year in June, Binance went ahead and became the first major trading platform to make an NFT marketplace available for the masses.
Looking Ahead
With the total market capitalisation of the crypto sector recently hitting US$3 trillion, it stands to reason that ETH adoption will most likely continue to increase moving forward, thus helping spur the currency's value in the near-to-mid term. Also, with Ethereum's highly anticipated transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism all set to go live sometime during early 2022, it will be interesting to see how things play out for the asset over the coming few months.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner's guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
