A recent market crash has seen the price of ethereum crumble as the market prepares for the launch of the London Hard Fork. The fork has been scheduled to go live on August 4th this year and so far, investors seem to be very interested in this move. Demand for ethereum has gone up in the past weeks, but even this demand has not seemed to be able to hold up the price of the altcoin.
Ethereum had earlier made a small run-up from the $2,000 trading range into the $2,300 range. At one point even jumping up as high as $2,400. But this was only briefly as the coin subsequently fell back down to the $2,300.
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Market enthusiasm seems to have held the coin price a bit steady. But this hold did not last long. With each passing day, the launch of EIP-1559 with the London hard fork draws close, and yet, the price of the coin remains in bearish territory.
Recent news coming out of the market shows ethereum keeps growing in popularity, showing that the protocol had added 5 million new and unique addresses in the span of 30 days. Even this seemed to not have had much of an impact on the coin price. This dip has happened on the heels of ethereum reaching a three-week high.
What Is The London Hard Fork?
Lots of investors have seen this thrown around a lot recently but still do not have any idea what it actually means. Or what the launch of the fork will mean for the Ethereum network.
The hard fork is going to be an update that will change the transaction fee model of the current mechanism. This will in turn help to reduce the high transaction fees experienced currently in the network.
Ethereum price continues to struggle | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com
The London hard fork is also meant to target the mining difficulty of the network. This upgrade will help to make proof of work mining more difficult, but at the same time, increase the ease of mining of the proof of stake mechanism. Proof of stake mechanism will only require validators to carry out the transaction confirmations on the network. Instead of using high-power machines like the current proof of work mechanism which requires computers to solve complex problems in order to confirm transactions and my blocks.
The London hard fork is part of a series of upgrades being carried out in the ETH network to facilitate a complete move to ETH 2.0, which has been scheduled for 2022. It is expected to help move towards the goal of more efficiency and scalability of the ethereum network.
Ethereum Price Recovery
So far, all indicators have pointed to bearish patterns for Ethereum. The price is currently trading lower than $2,100. With a threatening downturn looming.
RSI has fallen below 50. Now standing at 40. This number indicates that ETH is currently in a bear market.
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The current drop seems to be attributed to the fact that investors are starting to believe that the hard fork will experience another delay. The Ethereum technological upgrades have been riddled with delays so far. The founder Vitalik Buterin stating that the cause of the delay has been the people involved in the project. Citing internal team conflicts being the major reasons in the past five years.
Despite this, ETH 2.0 continues to surge onward with its upgrades. Investors continue to stake their coins with current numbers sitting at 6.1 million of ethereum have already being staked. The dollar equivalent value for this converts to over $13 billion currently staked in ETH 2.0.
Featured image from NewsBTC, chart from TradingView.com