Coinspeaker
Ethereum Price Hits New 2019 ATH but Decentralization Brought into Question

While the previous year we used to begin the articles with some sad news about the falling prices for cryptos including Ethereum and lost hops of investors, now that black stripe in life has been replaced with a white now. Ethereum has exceeded its short-term price prediction of $200 and now it is believed that it will reach its new height of $300 in the coming days.

Now ETH is the second largest world’s crypto by market cap and at the press time, it is traded for $256.37 having gained over 30% during the last 7 days.

Over the past days, we could observe rather impressive trading volumes of ETH. Within the previous 24 hours, it was close to $17 billion which is the largest trading volume the cryptocurrency has experienced this year.

These days a great number of investors and traders worldwide are actively purchasing and selling ETH. The desire to increase ETH holdings today is explained by the belief that its price will continue growing.

According to the data revealed by CoinMarketCap, the exchanges that have seen the highest trading volume of Ethereum are ZBG and EXX. The most popular trading pair to Ethereum across all major trading platforms is Tether (USDT).

Why the Price Is Growing

There are several reasons for the increase in ETH price but experts suppose that the fundamental one is the significant increase in the price of Bitcoin (BTC).

When the price for Bitcoin is going up, the whole market joins this tendency. Nevertheless, in the case with ETH, there were also some other grounds. Its price skyrocketed after it had been revealed that Samsung is going to add support for Ethereum. Now the wallet available in the Galaxy phones of Samsung will support Ethereum-based ERC-20 tokens.

Another reason for the price growth was the interest of Électricité de France (EDF), the world’s fifth largest electrical company, in the blockchain-based use-cases and solutions. To explore them the company has teamed up with Ethereum application “iExec”.

But even this is not the end of the positively influencing factors. In the framework of Consensus 2019,  Joe Lubin of Ethereum and Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin educator, made a bet on the five-year future of Ethereum which has led to a new wave of buzz around ETH. If Ethereum Dapp economy goes down in five years, Song will receive nearly 7 BTC from Lubin. But if it doesn’t happen, Song will send 810 ETH to Lubin.

Is It Really Decentralized?

While the short-term forecasts for the ETH price are rather optimistic, there are some controversial things about this crypto and its decentralization.

As recent research has indicated, one-third of all existing ETH is owned by just 376 whales. Such a situation calls into question true decentralization of this asset and the real use cases of it.

The analysis has also found these whales have no real impact on the price of ETH as they are mostly holders. Nevertheless, they can seriously influence the market in case they make large sell-offs.

Ethereum Price Hits New 2019 ATH but Decentralization Brought into Question