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Is Ethereum’s price about to breakout?

Buoyed by the wider market’s modest rally, ethereum [ETH] – the second largest cryptocurrency by value – 5% through last week and although it’s been a fairly uneventful weekend, some analysts say a breakout is imminent.   

According to analysis by Bitcoinist’s Eustace Cryptus, the cryptocurrency is consolidating into a tighter range as it increasingly sees lower highs and seems on the “verge of dropping below the 12 and 26 exponential moving average on the four-hour chart”, which could be an indication that it’s moving towards a short-term bearish trend with a sharp turn for the upside potentially looming. 

As for ethereum’s price longs, Cryptus says these are reproaching all-time highs, adding that there is a history of longs unwinding above the 510,000 mark. If the price manages to overcome the $138 and $140 resistance levels, “then the possibility of traders taking profits from the recent swing lows increases,” he says.

$138

Key resistance level

On the other hand, some analysts believe the $135.00 mark might act as a resistance. “Should ethereum surpass the $135.00 and $137.00 levels, it could move back toward the $140.00 resistance. If not, there is a risk of a downside extension below $132.00 and $130.00 in the coming sessions,” wrote analyst Aayush Jindal for EthNews.Ethereum 1-year share price performance, CMC Markets, as at 14 March 2019

 

What’s next?

Ethereum is currently considering the adoption of a programmatic proof-of-work algorithm, aka ProgPow, – a graphic processing unit’s (GPU) extension that minimises the efficiency gap available to fixed-function hardware – which is said to help standardise its mining to only general-purpose hardware. 

The potential implementation of the algorithm was discussed in a recent core developer’s meeting, headed by software developer Hudson Jameson. 

Some components of ProgPow have the potential to flip the whole cryptocurrency industry on its head as it would see developers building hardware to fit mining algorithms, rather than using mining algorithms that are optimised for GPUs to create the decentralisation of mining.   

ProgPow was created by the IfDefElse developer team, which is backed by Nvidia [NVDA] and Advanced Micro Devices [AMD], to reduce the control of ASIC miners in the ethereum network, after a steep rise saw GPU miners earning little to no profit. 

“We can see if it’s even going to be worth it to implement or if someone is going to make another ASIC in three months and all our work will be for nothing since the work isn’t entirely done yet. So I feel like this would be a more major factor, whether or not to go forward with ProgPow,” Hudson said. 

According to EtherChain, 57.8% of miners are in favour of implementing ProgPow. Its adoption, however, is yet to be determined as the algorithm is currently being reviewed by third-party audits.

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