Total Crypto Market Cap Back Over $2T
Prices of cryptocurrencies are surging at the moment with ETH and Cardano leading the way.
Crypto winter may be coming to a close after a strong end to last week and now an even more surprising pump to start this week. The war between Ukraine and Russia has seemingly lost its effect on both the stock and crypto markets for the time being.
The spark started last week when the fed announced that they were planning on doing six more interest rate hikes through the year. This was also a slight surprise, but people started putting their money into Bitcoin to further avoid the government taking every dollar they can.
In the last 24 hours, the entire crypto market is up over 3% bringing us back to the coveted $2 Trillion dollar mark. Leading the way today is Cardano (ADA), which is up about 7% at writing and almost back to $1. Cardano is one of the most hyped and well-backed projects on the market and poses a direct threat to Ethereum.
Bitcoin is even back to 43k; however, it has faced strong resistance at $44,500 four times so far this year. If it does make it that far on this move it will be important to see if it breaks through that or gets rejected once again.
A big reason for the surge in Ethereum price is the increased thought that ETH 2.0 is right around the corner. ETH 2.0 will move ETH from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake which will introduce staking as well as make it more scalable and efficient.
The increased optimism comes from the fact that this week ETH 2.0 just moved to "Kiln", the final testnet before launch, at the end of last week. Over the last couple of years, users have already staked over 10 million ETH to the ETH 2.0 contract. This is also a big reason for the sudden change in overall market sentiment.
The reason this is such an important move for ETH is that the uprise of the Cardanos and Solanas has proven how inefficient Ethereum currently is. The start of the market downturn towards the end of last year could be attributed to high gas fees making the network hard to use for those who were just starting to take an interest. This created a barrier to entry for many would-be investors that caused many of the popular Dapps built on ETH to take major hits because they were too expensive to use and impermanent losses were piling up.
All in all, who knows what will happen with the war and other macroeconomic factors throughout the rest of the week, but it is a nice change of pace to wake up to this kind of movement. There are many things that can happen overnight but as traders, we can enjoy this one for the day with ETH over 3k and BTC hanging around 43k.
After many weeks in “extreme fear” the Bitcoin Fear and Greed index finally showed signs of life, moving to just “fear” on Monday. We still have ground to cover to get back to all-time highs, but this is a step in the right direction.
