It looks like Ethereum is climbing in price again, bubbling under $200. The Istanbul upgrade in coming weeks looks to assist in scaling, or the ability to handle more transactions per second. So many tokens run on Ethereum, including many stable coins, like DAI, USDC, Paxos, Gemini and others, like the Euro stable token. Now it looks like Tether, the biggest stable coin by daily traded volume, is moving to Ethereum platform too.

USDT or Tether was originally run on the Bitcoin Omni layer, a layer run on top of the Bitcoin blockchain itself. But in recent months Tether has been migrating over to the Ethereum platform. Currently around $2.5 billion worth of USDT is still run on the Omni layer, but already $1.5 billion is also now running or minted on Ethereum platform. And this will probably continue to occur, until all USDT is eventually run on Ethereum.

This may be a cause for concern in that it could slow down the blockchain. But hopefully scaling will come soon. Look out for the Istanbul upgrade, possibly due in October. The Ethereum network is already getting flooded and clogged. Over 100 000 transactions were apparently stuck on the Ethereum network recently, some for hours. This goes against all our loved reasons for using altcoins and crypto, like its speed of transaction. Nevertheless, the Istanbul upgrade in October should help overcome this problem.

We certainly hope so. ETH has been a firm favourite among crypto investors and traders from its inception. It is after all the biggest platform for smart contracts and the majority of all other altcoins. I have some ETH in my portfolio and it is languishing in the doldrums, or below my initial purchase price, thanks to its poor performance in the bear market and failure to perform yet in the current bull market of 2019.

Bitcoin currently only needs to double or 2x in price in order to return to its ATH (all time high) of around $20 000, but Ethereum will need to 7x or increase seven times its price to return to the ATH of around $1400. That is a massive difference, making any investor regret buying ETH instead of BTC back in 2018. Also ETH has lost 45% in value since its recent peak around $360 on 25 June this year. The 100 day EMA is still above the 200 day EMA, which is good, but the 50 and 21 day EMAs are below the 200, though not by much, and price looks like it is about to test the 200, which sits at $205 on Bitstamp, just a mere $8 away.

Let’s hope the current ETH “uptrend” is a sign of positive bullish momentum returning in what seems to be a rather sluggish situation at present. Curiously both BTC and ETH went up around 333% this year since the low of late last year. However BTC has held its gains at 222% while ETH is currently only up around 141% since that last seasonal low. So ETH is really pulling down my portfolio profits overall.

It’s interesting that the most valuable altcoin as far as use case and popularity is concerned, happens to be taking so much strain in regaining value during this bull run. I guess it goes back to the old ICO craze of 2017/8 where so many new altcoins boarded the Ethereum blockchain but sold off their ETH holdings during the heavy bear market dump to salvage capital for daily expenses. Still, Ethereum is one of a kind in a sense, and is the blockchain upon which most coins operate, so it is here to stay, and sentiment suggests that it will still do very well.

I would adopt a wait-and-see approach now though, as the $200 resistance will be a hard one to crack, despite the recent “uptrend”, and volume is rather low overall in the crypto space. Perhaps people are bored with the slow pace of the bull run. Only time will tell. I’m no expert so this is just my opinion and not investment advice. Live long and profit.

(all pics in my articles are from a commons or free site like pixabay or unsplash)