Ethereum (ETH) was able to recover its position as the second largest digital asset in the market. Just a few days ago, the popular cryptocurrency surpassed XRP, which held the second spot since November 2018. Ethereum is also one of the best performing virtual currencies in the last week.
Ethereum Recovers Part Of Price Lost
Ethereum has recovered after a few weeks operating very weakly compared to other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or XRP. Back in November Ethereum was traded close to $215. However, it fell down to $83 at the beginning of December. This represents a drop of more than 60% in just a few weeks.
During that time, XRP was also able to perform much better than Ethereum. During the same period of time, XRP lost 45% of its value. This allowed XRP to outperform Ethereum and surpass it in terms of market capitalization.
Ethereum experienced a larger sell-off than XRP due to the fact that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced enforcement actions against two Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). This generated a lot of fear in the market. Paragon and Airfox, two of the ICOs accused of selling unregistered securities in the US had to pay $250,000 and give investors their funds back.
Other Initial Coin Offerings sold the tokens gathered during their sale period. Most of the firms raised ETH coins. These virtual currencies were sold when the market was crashing, increasing the sell-off.
Now, there is another sentiment around Ethereum. There are some important developments that are going to help the network grow and outperform other assets. The Constantinople hard fork that Ethereum is going to experience around January 16 is very bullish. Ethereum’s supply will be reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH. Less selling pressure for miners and a higher or stable demand for ETH are related to higher prices. However, the results are yet to be seen. The market could be pricing the supply reduction before the hard fork.
At the time of writing, Ethereum is being traded around $151 and it has a market capitalization of $15.83 billion. Since it reached the lowest point in more than a year, it already grew more than 81%. In the last 7 days, ETH registered an increase of 17.1% according to CoinMarketCap.
