Bitcoin recovered slightly as its halving event approaches, adding 5% over 24 hours. Ether also rose, rising 4% to $3,000. According to Laurent Kssis, a crypto ETP specialist at CEC Capital, the uptick for bitcoin will continue for U.S. markets and then readjust and push back to earlier levels. Bitcoin reached a weekly low of $58,800 this week and is currently approaching the $65,000 mark. The halving is predicted to take place late Friday or early Saturday UTC. The quadrennial event slows the rate of growth in bitcoin supply by 50%. Altcoins also gained, with dogwifhat (WIF) jumping 18%, Ethena Labs’ ENA 16% and Sei Networks’ SEI by 14%.
While Bitcoin has made headlines in 2024 with the approval of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the upcoming halving, Ethereum (ETH) is potentially positioned to make waves in the coming months and years, according to Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood.
Ark Invest held its Big Ideas event, an annual opportunity to review high-level market trends and potentially disruptive technologies. At one of these events, Wood asserted that Ethereum could reach a market capitalization of $20 trillion by 2032.
The current market cap of ETH is around $400 billion and has approached $500 billion in 2024. The market cap of the S&P 500 is around $40 trillion to 45 trillion. If ETH were to amass a market capitalization of $20 trillion, the price per token would be around $166,000.
The Ark Invest CEO believes the mainstream adoption of ETH as a financial tool will be the main catalyst for this price prediction. Ethereum is a way for people to access decentralized finance applications. The applications allow anyone to interact with different financial actions, such as trading, lending, borrowing and staking, without going through a centralized intermediary. If these applications are adopted on a large scale, the demand for ETH — and its price — could increase.
Talks of spot Ethereum ETFs are ongoing. Releasing the ETFs could have an impact similar to that of spot Bitcoin ETFs, which brought in huge amounts of inflows and propelled the price of Bitcoin higher.$BTC $ETH $BNB
$SOL $ETH $BTC The bitcoin (BTC) price is likely to weaken after the reward halving, a quadrennial event that slows the rate of growth in bitcoin supply and looks set to occur around April 19-20, Wall Street giant JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report on Wednesday.
The bank sees downside for the world’s largest cryptocurrency after the halving because the market is still in overbought conditions, according to its analysis of open interest in bitcoin futures. Furthermore, the cryptocurrency price of about $61,200 is still above the bank’s volatility-adjusted comparison with gold, which sets it at $45,000, and its projected production cost of $42,000 after the halving. The bitcoin production cost has historically acted as a lower boundary for BTC prices.
The biggest impact of the halving will be felt by mining companies: “As unprofitable bitcoin miners exit the bitcoin network, we anticipate a significant drop in the hashrate and consolidation among bitcoin miners with a highest share for publicly-listed bitcoin miners,” analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote. “Post halving event, it is also likely that some bitcoin mining firms may look to diversify into low energy cost regions such as Latin America or Africa to deploy their inefficient mining rigs to gain salvage values from those rigs which would otherwise sit idle,” the authors wrote.