The Ethereum price has dipped by 0.5% in the past 24 hours, with its decline to $1,821 coming as the market as a whole falls by 1% today.
ETH’s price means it has lost 1% in a week and 13% in the past month, although it remains up by 52% since the beginning of the year.
These movements come just as Lido has rolled out withdrawals on its Ethereum staking platform, enabling users to take out their locked ETH and potentially sell it.
Given that around 6.6 million ETH is staked via Lido, this could result in a massive glut of Ethereum entering the market, although it needs to be remembered that withdrawals will be queued and happen in a gradual manner.
Ethereum Price Prediction as Lido ETH Staking Withdrawals Gets Green Light – What Happens Next?
ETH’s chart has very recently turned interesting, with its indicators reaching a point where a breakout rally is suggested.
For one, ETH’s 30-day moving average (yellow) has just climbed above its 200-day (blue), forming a ‘golden cross’ that tends to signal rallies.
Similarly, the coin’s relative strength index (purple) just surpassed 50 this morning, another indicator of growing momentum.
And if that weren’t enough, ETH’s chart has also formed a pennant, with its support (green) and resistance (red) levels converging in on each other, something which indicates that the coin will have to make a move to a new level soon.
This change in ETH’s technical indicators comes as Lido opens up withdrawals for its Ethereum staking platform.
This means that Lido users can return the Lido Staked Ether (stETH) they hold for the ETH they’ve previously staked with the platform, and given that 32% of all Ethereum stakers use Lido, such a feature could have a big impact on ETH’s price.
However, as we’ve noted before, ETH withdrawals cannot all happen at once, with withdrawal requests joining a queue that would take months to be fulfilled if all stakers chose to withdraw.
And on the other hand, the successful introduction of withdrawals is likely to encourage more users towards Lido and Ethereum staking in general, an effect that could help push ETH’s price further upwards.
Indeed, data from Dune Analytics reveals that the ratio of staked ETH to non-staked ETH is now at 16.6%, up from 10% a year ago.
This ratio will almost certainly rise in the coming months as the market adapts to being able to withdraw staked ETH, a change that will take more ETH out of circulation and thereby increase the altcoin’s price.
And looking at the bigger picture, it’s worth noting that Ethereum continues to enjoy more adoption than most other layer-one networks.
Recent examples include major French bank Société Générale trialing a euro-denominated stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain, as well as Visa testing USDC payments and Microsoft piloting an Ethereum wallet in its Edge browser.
Given such interest in Ethereum and given that it continues to account for 58% of the entire DeFi sector, ETH is more than well-placed to ride further rallies in the near and more distant future.
Assuming more positive investor and market sentiment, it could easily return to $2,000 in the next few weeks, while the latter half of the year could see it near $3,000.
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A New High-Potential Altcoin
As fundamentally strong as Ethereum undoubtedly is, traders may not witness a big ETH rally until later in the year, because of the fragility of the market and the global economy.
As such, traders may prefer to consider newer altcoins that may be on the cusp of big, above-average gains, particularly if they receive listings from big exchanges.
Perhaps the prime example of this right now is SpongeBob (SPONGE), an ERC-20 meme token that has enjoyed gains of well over 2,000% since listing directly on Uniswap on May 4.
While very little is known about SPONGE in terms of its team and exact origins, it has ridden the recent wave of interest in meme tokens, which have become very fashionable again in the context of a flagging wider market.
Indeed, SPONGE has recently celebrated listings from Gate.io, Poloniex, MEXC, LBANK, CoinW and Toobit, while it’s very likely that the meme token will enjoy several more big listings in the coming weeks, pushing its price up even higher.
SPONGE now has more than 12,000 holders and a total maximum supply of 40.4 billion, making it potentially deflationary if demand continues rising.
And because it’s expecting further listings, it could potentially rise to $0.0006 and $0.0007 in the next few weeks, with listings by really big exchanges possibly boosting it as high as $0.001.
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