Ethereum could hit $10 K all-time high, according to analyst

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Ethereum could hit $10 K all-time high, according to analyst

Bitcoin exploded to a new all-time high Wednesday, just one day after the first exchange traded fund ETF started trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF BITO saw more than $550 million dollars invested into the new futures-linked product in its debut trading day.

That enthusiasm, in part, helped push bitcoin's price BTC to a new all-time high north of $65,000 Wednesday morning. Now, one analyst at Fundstrat Global Advisors says that enthusiasm is likely to spill over into pushing the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, ethereum, well past its own prior record.

Fundstrat's Head of Digital Asset Strategy told Yahoo Finance Live he expects ether ETH-USD to not only move past its prior all-time high of about $4,200 set back in May, but potentially all the way up to $10,000. What we've seen in prior bull market cycles for bitcoin is that bitcoin generally leads the rally, capital rotates, investors take their gains and rotate into altcoins, with the most dominant heavily traded altcoin being ethereum, Farrell explained. And quite frankly, we think that a lot of people are overlooking ethereum into the end of the year, just due to the fact that bitcoin has garnered the lion's share of headlines. While that may be true, Yahoo Finance previously highlighted an earlier $10,000 price call for ether from Magnetic Managing Director Megan Kaspar. Both Kaspar and Farrell point to the same underlying catalyst for their bullish price targets — ethereum has planned deflationary changes to its network looming.

You don't meet the average investor who is aware of recent software updates in the ethereum network, Farrell said. Recently, they updated the network with what was called EIP 1559, in which transaction fees are actually burned, causing a disinflationary effect. What we've seen with the recent NFT craze is that all of the non-fungible tokens that have been traded on the Ethereum network have actually led to a rapid increase in the amount of ethereum's supply burn. Kaspar has since reiterated her $10,000 price target for the same reason. She predicts that when the next remaining network change goes into effect, potentially sometime around the first quarter of 2022, it would carry roughly the same impact as three bitcoin halvings. A halving is defined as when the bitcoin block reward paid to miners is cut in half roughly every four years as dictated by bitcoin's code. It also has historically kicked off the bull cycle for bitcoin's price moves, just as it did most recently in the spring of 2020.

Whether bitcoin's recent rally continues to feed ether's momentum remains to be seen. Ether jumped 9% Wednesday to top $4,100 after the ProShares bitcoin-futures ETF began trading Tuesday.

Farrell and his team at Fundstrat also maintained their earlier $100,000 year-end bitcoin price target and predicted a potential move to as high as $168,000 if the historic inflows to the new bitcoin ETF continue.