On Thursday (6 December 2018), at around 13:00 UTC, on CryptoCompare, the price of Ether (ETH) broke through the $100 support level, to reach a price of $99.85, which is roughly where it was in May 2017.
Here are two interesting charts from CryptoCompare.
First, the three-year chart:
And here is the one-month chart:
As you can see, it has been pretty much downhill price action during the past 30 days. On 6 November 2018, Ether was trading around $$214.86; this means that during this period, Ether has lost over 52% of its value. However, if you look at the decline since the all-time high of $1,385, which was reached on 13 January 2018, the decline has been even more severe: Ether has lost over 92% of its value since then!
As for the reasons for this insane price correction, there are potentially several factors at play:
- drop in retail investors’ interest in all cryptocurrencies due to the severe correction in the Bitcoin price (roughly an 80% fall since it reached its all-time high price of $19,345 on 16 December 2018) this year;
- crypto projects that raised funds via ICOs in 2017 selling some/all of their ETH holdings to pay for their running costs (such as employee salaries);
- crack down on ICOs by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and especially its recent enforcement actions and subsequent public statements, has made everyone nervous about ICOs in general, which means that we are unlikely to see many ICOs in 2019 either; and
- there have been no major catalysts for moving the ETH price up during the course of this year (unlike Bitcoin, for example, for which there is at least some hope of an ETF getting approved in 2019).
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