Despite reaching a seven-day high of $321.12 earlier this week, the price of Ether appears to be experiencing declining levels of support. In the short-term, crypto experts have voiced concerns that Ether could be set to reach a new weekly low of around $260, with prices not seen this low since August 15. Recent security issues and network congestion have also plagued Ethereum. Fortunately, those fears have been allayed by a considerable price spike in the last 24 hours.
Although the price of Ethereum looked set to break through $270 and towards $265, overnight there was significant support and momentum for Ethereum. At around midnight, the price of Ethereum shot up from $280 to $296 within a matter of seconds, before retracting to a more stable level of $286. What was the root cause of this spike? A climb of $400 in the value of Bitcoin, it would seem. A move which was mooted just 48 hours ago.
Overnight markets saw Bitcoin jump by 6.6% within the space of 20 minutes, pushing prices above $6,600 for the first time in several weeks. The price on Bitcoin had risen steadily throughout the day yesterday, up from a low of $6,300 towards the $6,500 mark, before the significant spike to $6,750. The spike could well be connected to overall sentiment among crypto investors in lieu of the new Bitcoin ETF proposals that are due to be agreed by the end of the week. An approval of proposals could be a step-change for Bitcoin and other leading digital assets such as Ethereum, with all the new liquidity from institutional investors that a positive decision would bring.
However, other media outlets have reported that cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX was the victim of a DDoS attack overnight, forcing the platform offline. Some reporters claim the outage of the BitMEX exchange could have been enough to force Bitcoin’s price spike.
Ripple (XRP) was another welcome beneficiary of the Bitcoin spike, rising 1.78% to $0.34, according to CoinDesk. Overall, the entire market soared by a value of $11 billion within a single hour. At the time of the spike, the combined value of all cryptocurrencies was said to be at $221 billion.
Despite the recent fluctuations in the price of Ether, a founder of a leading Ethereum-based prediction market platform believes Ethereum’s network is expanding at an impressive rate. Martin Koppelmann, founder of Gnosis, said recently that the performance of decentralized applications (dApps) on the Ethereum blockchain is the best measure of Ethereum’s recent growth. Koppelmann said in a recent blog post that he was unfazed by the recent drop in the value of Ether as the open-source developer and dApp community continues to thrive.
Koppelmann believes the only “numbers he cares about” are the “usage of decentralized applications”. He sought to allay fears among Ether investors by intimating that a “side effect” of the demand for the “use of applications in this reliable, open, and interlinked environment” will be a steady climb in Ether’s value.