Cointelegraph By Samuel Haig
With Ethereum inching its way into new all-time highs over the past 24 hours, a number of onlookers believe Ether could quickly surge through the $1,400 price range.
Ethereum’s robust fundamentals are strengthening the conviction that Ether might sail past resistance in the mid-$1,400s, with many pointing to Ethereum’s ever-growing DeFi ecosystem as the force most-likely to propel ETH into price discovery.
On Jan. 19, Spencer Noon of crypto VC fund Variant shared 11 indicators he believes suggests that a parabolic bull-run is nigh. He pointed to the fact taht more than one million unique addresses t have interacted with DeFi over the past eight months.
Noon adds that monthly DEX volume is currently sitting at an all-time high of more than $30 billion, while more than $20 billion has been deposited into DeFi lending protocols — of which more than $4.5 billion has been issued as currently outstanding loans.
Looking beyond DeFi, Noon also highlights that Ethereum is the top blockchain network by daily fees generated — beating out BTC by more than 50%; the number of daily active Ether addresses has doubled in the past 12 months to reach all-time highs of 550,000; and that nearly $20 billion worth of stablecoins were minted on Ethereum over the past year.
The thread notes that more than $25 billion is currently locked in DeFi, adding that 21 decentralized finance protocols now represent at least $100 million in total value locked each.
#1: Ethereum continues to dwarf the entire crypto space in terms of fees paid ($7.25m daily avg) — proving it’s the most useful network in the world. pic.twitter.com/t7Co50GukJ
— Spencer Noon (@spencernoon) January 19, 2021
Despite Ethereum’s surging fundamentals, Noon notes that the number of Ether transactions valued at more than $100,000 is seven times smaller than during Jan. 2018’s highs, suggesting that “institutions still haven’t entered the game.”
On the same day, Token Terminal, an analytics platform that uses traditional financial metrics like P/E to examine crypto markets, tweeted a chart of Ethereum’s “price to sales ratio” with the caption “this time is different.”
This time is different pic.twitter.com/4pfqAnvm9n
— Token Terminal (@tokenterminal) January 19, 2021
The chart shows that Ethereum’s price relative to the fees generated by the network is reaching all-time lows — suggesting the market may be extremely undervalued. However, replies on Twitter challengede the applicability of using the metric to Ethereum, noting that Ethereum’s “sales” comprise fees that are collected by miners.
Messari also shared data indicating that the daily volume of Ethereum transactions now exceeds that of Bitcoin by 28%.
