Ethereum: changes for the year, forecasts and popular questions

How has the price of Ether changed over the year, has it become more popular? Where will the currency go in the perspective of a year, two, three years? How do ICO-ester sales affect the entire ecosystem? What impact will network updates, futures, PoS?

Price Ethereum

Looking at the changes that occurred on the 1 cut in the year, we can conclude that Efir lost in value, having dropped from $ 304 to the token a year ago, ETH is now trading at an average of $ 291 at the time of writing the article, 13 of September 2018.

Instruments for unambiguous analysis of measuring absolute popularity simply do not exist. Speaking of one of the most important aspects, which, directly or indirectly, concerns all the participants of the crypto community, without exception - entering the mainstream - we can see how interest is reflected through search queries.

Graph of the number of requests to Google for the word Ethereum for 1 year

Forecast prices

This year, 2018, according to some forecasts, the price of Ethereum will reach about $ 2. By the end of next 500, Ethereum is expected to be trading somewhere around $ 2019.

Similarly, by the end of 2020, it is assumed that Ethereum will be valued at $ 31'000 per token.

In the same time, other sources, predict a decline in the price of Ether in 2018 to $ 98 per token, by the end of 2019 to $ 74, and a return to $ 119 by the end of 2020 of the year.

Since the price predictions are his opinions and most of the forecasts do not contain the valuation methodology and the reasons for the prediction, let's turn to the real factors affecting the cost of Ethereum network tokens.

The reasons why Ethereum can rise in price:

● network updates, including the transition to the PoS algorithm

● increase in the number of decentralized applications (dApps);

● expanding the commercial use of Ethereum;

How does ICO affect the price of Ethereum?

Ignoring the fact that the number of ETH, which is now circulating in the secondary market, is a record one, we will focus on the effects that crowdfunding has on the network of the ether through ICO.

Largest ICO on ETH price chart

Contrary to popular belief, ICO has a beneficial effect on the price of ETH, and here's why:

1. ICO is an economy built on the basis of Ethereum. It means:

● ETH price can directly affect the price of tokens in a positive or negative way;

● the price of tokens can only positively directly affect the price of ETH.

Making a conclusion from the above, the negative effects are limited to the sum of the increase in market capitalization.

2. ICO basically acts as a long-term gateway for Ethereum, eliminating the direct supply of ETH from the market.

Some common questions on the topic:

- What happens if the ICO project sells all collected ETH in one night?

- Yes, it will affect the price and may occur, but it is very unlikely. Even in this case, compare the amount of funds raised by medium-sized projects with the capitalization of the entire network and assess the level of influence. Why average? Almost all large projects freeze the funds they receive and get access to them in portions throughout the 1-5 years.

- What if the funds raised at the ICO at ETH are stolen and exchanged?

- Yes, it can happen, but it is unlikely and the effect does not differ from the "drain" overnight, discussed in the last paragraph.

- But the company that conducts ICO is spending ETH on financing its projects!

- Yes, but any startup has a reasonable development speed. This waste rate provides liquidity in the market, which in itself is a plus, and does so at a controlled rate.

Some common questions on other topics.

- What will happen when futures for ETH appear?

- At Crypto Facilities, futures contracts at ETH have been traded since May. If we take into account the traditional financial market: CME abandoned the idea (Terry Duffy said that the exchange "does not plan to add any new products"), the application for ETH-futures from the CBOE was rejected by the SEC due to "lack of collateral".

- What about Ether-ETF and Notes (ETN)?

- Also, as with simpler derivatives, there are already ETF and ETF on the crypto market, however, this is not used by institutional investors and it is rather an internal cryptographic tool, which the creators place on great prospects.

Expanding the question - what is in traditional financial markets - as in the case of Bitcoin, these derivatives are built on the basis of other, namely futures contracts. Given the current situation with the refusal of futures on Ether, more complex derivatives created on their basis, from the traditional market to wait in the near future is not necessary.

- Introduction of PoS and other updates will change everything?

- Change, of course, but not all. It is worth noting that the Casper code, which will complement PoW with the PoS algorithm, taking into account the latest changes in the vision of network developers, is still in development.

It is also worth noting that, according to the updated Ethereum roadmap and Vitalik Buterin, his vision will be combined with the implementation of Sharding (distribution of transfer signatures on the network between validators, accelerating network bandwidth to values ​​comparable to Visa).

Plasma and Raiden, provided for transferring the network to p2p transaction confirmations, in order to reduce network commissions, are still far on the horizon.

It should be noted that the introduction of PoS from the moment of its planning (2015) has undergone conceptual vision changes, and at the moment, Ethereum is no longer going to get rid of PoW mining, therefore adding a new consensus algorithm for periodic snapshots of the network will not make a revolutionary the changes that he first declared and waited for by many.

- EOS displace Ethereum?

- Despite the fact that the first one is a much more productive network in terms of the number of transactions, and has the same functionality of the second, this does not negate the experience of Ethereum and the lack of the latter at EOS in the matter of problem solving.

Probably, the developers of Ethereum are developing solutions to simplify the protocol, like Plasma, in order to solve the problem at the architecture level, and not to be in direct superiority, which loses its meaning in the future for several years.

Results

It is worth keeping in mind that when it comes to Ethereum, the more the platform is used, the higher the price of the token will be. It can be concluded that the price of ETH will ultimately depend on new collaborations, commercial applications, the use of the Ethereum blockchain, the development and updating of the network.

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