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Ether (ETH), as we know, is the native coin of the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum price has been going through a wild roller coaster ride during 2021.
The price of Ethereum at the beginning of the year was at $737, then it went all the way to $4,362 on May 12, 2021, thus creating a gain of nearly 500%.
The price then went down to $2,714 on May 21, 2021. Then, it declined further down to $2,000 and then further down to $1,707.60 on 22 June, and the price at the time of reporting has been trending at 2285.
Those who have been buying ETH and selling ETH for profits well know that the road to success has not always been smooth. The project has been facing criticism from the community for the high transaction fees and the slow development of the Ethereum 2.0 update. A lot of competitors like Polkadot and Cardano are seemingly working their way up to overthrow ETH.
Despite the tough competition, Ethereum continues to be one of the popular projects in the cryptocurrency industry. This is partly due to the large numbers of dApps, DeFi apps, and NFTs using the blockchain.
There are at present more than 2,500 dApps running on the Ethereum blockchain. Particularly, the network has been attracting a lot of financial institutions. The Ether products represent more than 25% of assets under management (AUM) in crypto investment products.
The reasons for being bullish about Ethereum are Ethereum 2.0 upgrades, the use cases, transaction volumes, media coverage, demand for inflation hedging, price of Bitcoin, and trader speculation.
Ethereum has to state that once their blockchain shifts to PoS, they will use at least 99.95% less energy. This despite its energy-use forecasts being estimates.
As a part of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), the Berlin upgrade went live at block 12,244,000 on 15 April 2021. The upgrade consisted of optimizing contracts to address transactional efficiencies, which saw a sharp rise in transaction fees rise with updates to how the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) reads code, with appropriate changes to prevent distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.
The London upgrade is getting the EIPs implemented in stages. It is scheduled for 14 July 2021. The upgrade was initially activated on the test network on June 24, 202, thus setting the stage for the major upgrade on the Blockchain Mainnet later during July.
London upgrade is highly anticipated, as the EIP-1559 will change the way Ethereum will charge gas fees. This is expected to switch from its current auction mechanism that has resulted in high prices. This will likely start with a base fee amount that will be adjusted up and down by the protocol depending upon how the network congestion is.
Ethereum is looking to accelerate adoption by bringing down the gas fees to encourage further development of smart contracts on the blockchain for decentralized finance (DeFi) and several other decentralized applications (DApps).
