ETH/USD – 27% Weekly Price Hike Sees New ATH At $3542
Key Support Levels: $3400, $3200, $3076.
Key Resistance Levels: $3542, $3656, $3800.

Ether is up by a total of 27% this week and it set a new ATH price at $3542 yesterday. It headed lower slightly today but rebounded from the support at $3400 to trade at $3485.

ETH is now in a steep ascending price channel since breaking out of a symmetrical triangle pattern in the last few days of April. In May, ether broke above $2800 and continued higher above $3000 on Monday – reaching $3400. On Tuesday, it dropped to $3200 but rebounded from there yesterday to set the new ATH price.

The $3,500 level forms a notable resistance – it was tested a few times in the past few days and it’s important for the price to overcome it definitively to continue higher.

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In the latest sign that crypto continues to filter through into the mainstream, CNBC host Jim Cramer has spent the week discussing the large quantity of Ether (ETH) he holds.

On CNBC's Squawk Box on May 4, Cramer said he owns “a lot of Ether,” explaining that he first bought it when he was trying to “buy some nonfungible token on TIME magazine. So they made you buy Ether first. I didn't get it so I just kept the Ether.”

Cramer was referring to TIME's recent auction of magazine covers in the form of nonfungible tokens when each cover eventually sold for between $100,000–$250,000.

Keeping the Ether, however, now “seems like a better deal,” his interviewer quipped, in light of Ether's current rally to trade above $3,300 — up 130% just this week. "I'll buy a house with Ether," Cramer half-joked in response.

Cramer's point about paying for real estate with his crypto profits is more than an off-the-cuff remark. The television host said last month that he had recently paid off a mortgage using proceeds from his Bitcoin (BTC) investments.

Speaking in more detail about using Bitcoin for the down payment on his property in another interview earlier this week, Cramer presented himself neither as a purist HODLer nor as someone who carelessly sells it off:

“You don't have to stay in it. That's again this kind of straw man that what's going to happen is you buy Bitcoin, it goes up and then you lose everything. And what I'm saying is you buy Bitcoin, you take out what you can, [...] so you can buy something of great store of value historically and then you can let it run. [...] It's not a lottery ticket. Many, many people went along for the ride and I think they should sell some and then do something else with it and they can keep some running.”
In what he presented as an approach to crypto that goes against certain “all-or-nothing” trading orthodoxies, Cramer added, “I don't get enjoyment from living in Bitcoin, but I did get great enjoyment from buying this place, stocking the pond, fishing, enjoying my family together.”

https://cryptonews.net/en/news/ethereum/612946/

For the last few days, Ethereum has been adding incredible returns for investors. According to CoinMarketCap, on Monday, ETH added over 16% pushing the coin to a new record of slightly over $3,450. At the time of writing, the coin was trading at around $3,470, a gain of 9.43% over the last 24 hours.

Ethereum Short Squeeze Is Responsible For The Rally
A short squeeze refers to when short-sell orders in the futures market are liquidated in a short period of time. When the shorts are liquidated, short-sellers will have to buy back their positions. This automatically causes buyer demand to increase in the market.

Hence, the number of shorts rapidly declines, and long contracts or buy orders begin to dominate the market.

In the case of Ethereum, the last 24 hours has seen all-time high short liquidations across all derivative exchanges. According to cryptoanalysis firm, CryptoQuant, the cryptocurrency liquidations reached about $55 million in exit leveraged long positions causing the price to surge to a new record high.

Epic Ethereum Short Squeeze Pushes Rally To New ATH

Ethereum skyrocketed to its all-time high on Wednesday, and popular crypto trader Elliot Wainman thinks the second biggest crypto asset is just getting started.

Wainman tells his 313,000 YouTube subscribers that he thinks the leading smart contract platform has more upside than Bitcoin (BTC).

“I’ve been a broken record about the importance and potential of Ethereum as a base layer protocol for the future of finance and an asset that simply must go up based on its fundamentals.”

The analyst points to a chart shared on Twitter demonstrating a huge surge in the number of users actively using MetaMask, the popular Ethereum wallet.

🦊 MetaMask monthly active users 📈 pic.twitter.com/4KywiO5i1R

— Documenting Ethereum 🧾 (@DocumentEther) April 28, 2021

Explains Wainman,

“If you’re in the tech world or you’ve built a tech product or you’ve tried to raise money in the tech world, you’ll know that almost the entirety of your valuation is going to be based on how many users you’re able to hold and keep active in your network. This chart says it all: that the Ethereum network is starting to have more active users than ever before at a parabolic growth rate. And that to me is why Ethereum is so valuable.

And I say it time and time again: Ethereum’s not more valuable because it’s [a] faster, cheaper or easier user experience, it’s more valuable because it has the developers, it has the users, and it keeps growing.”

The trader posits that the simple laws of supply and demand dictate Ethereum’s price will go up. Trading at $3,391.6 at time of writing, ETH’s value is already up 33.9% in the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.

Wainman says the highly anticipated EIP 1159 upgrade, which seeks to make the Ethereum network more cost-efficient, will reduce the supply of the asset.

“Understand that there is a fee now that is going to be paid with every Ethereum transaction that will always be burned. This means that with every usage of Ethereum’s network, the actual amount of Ethereum in the world gets reduced slightly. And that is extremely good for the Ether asset. Right now, new Ethereum come out into the world with each block, and that’s actually going to go on forever, so there is actually natural inflation within the Ethereum network. But now with the base fee burning, this will reverse the inflation in Ethereum, and actually make Ethereum deflationary, meaning that there will be less and less Ethereum in the world over time.”

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For a moment, search interest in ethereum (ETH) surpassed that in bitcoin (BTC) in the past day, but dogecoin (DOGE) swiftly eclipsed them both for a while, still battling it out with ETH. However, the world's second cryptoasset outperforming the first one in a number of metrics does not seem to surprise insiders who claim BTC no longer has an influence on ETH's price, and that the latter may hit prices greater than the now forecasted USD 5,000.

Google trends saw quite an interesting play in the last day between the three coins - or rather the public's interest in them, to be precise. While the search in the term 'bitcoin' was higher for a while, 'ethereum' started rising, at one point and very briefly surpassing the search interest in the number one coin by market capitalization.

But from underneath the 'fight' between the two, dogecoin pushed higher, first surpassing the interest in ethereum a couple of times, then jumping above both the top coins.

On average, in the past day, the search interest in ethereum and dogecoin is at the same level (represented by the value of 40/100), while bitcoin stands somewhat higher (value of 61).

DOGE has been rallying recently, fuelled by certain celebrities' tweets, spectacularly entering the top 10 coins by market capitalization list, where it currently sits at the 5th place. It hit a new all-time (ATH) high on May 4, reaching USD 0.45. It's up 16.5% in a day and 63% in a week.

All this comes as the price of ethereum makes strong steps upwards too, hitting a series of all-time highs, as well as surpassing the USD 3,000 level, and then hitting USD 3,450 in a day. At 7:30 UTC, it's trading at USD 3,367, after it appreciated 7.5% in a day and 32% in a month. Much of this appreciation has been attributed to the growing institutional interest, the continued growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications Ethereum, and the upcoming developments like EIP-1559.

"At any rate, Ethereum is certainly not growing due to Bitcoin’s influence, as the world’s largest cryptocurrency is still stuck in the mid-[USD]50k’s, as it has been for quite a while now," global payment network Mercuryo Co-founder and CEO, Petr Kozyakov, told Cryptonews.com.

Unlike ETH and DOGE, bitcoin last hit an all-time high on April 14, dropping from that almost USD 65,000 since, and remaining relatively stable, currently at USD 56,269. It's down 4% in a day and is up 2.6% in a week. It's also the only among the three to see a drop in the past month.

Additionally, there's been a change in ranking when it comes to the 24h trading volume: bitcoin currently ranks 4th, with a volume of USD 55.85bn, while ethereum takes the 2nd place, with USD 71bn (behind tether (USDT) - USD 155bn). Dogecoin follows the two, sitting on the 5th place, with USD 19.63bn.

On the other hand, ETH surpassed BTC in one more way - liquidations.

Over the past 24 hours, USD 444m worth of trading positions in the BTC derivatives market were liquidated, compared with ETH's USD 523m.

(Learn more: Obsessed Amateur Crypto Traders Are 'Disproportionately Liquidated')

The USD 5,000 narrative
According to BitBull Capital CEO Joe DiPasquale, ETH's potential for appreciation can be assessed by looking at the ETH/BTC pair, which is still trading well below its all-time high of over BTC 0.15.

The most recent resistance level on this pair of 0.05 has been broken, and it can be expected for ETH to trade as high as 0.07 before meeting any significant resistance, said DiPasquale. However, he noted that a retracement towards USD 3,000 is likely, given the swift rise, before ETH makes another move up.

"Keeping the ETH/BTC ATH in mind, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a [USD] 5,000 ETH soon," the CEO said.

And it seems like DiPasquale is not the only one seeing this price in ETH's charts - and quite soon. Nigel Green, CEO and Founder of deVere Group, said that ETH's rally over the past months has been fuelled by the rising institutional interest and "growing recognition that borderless digital currencies are the future of money," as MarketWatch reported. "This momentum is likely to build further in the near-term and I believe ether will hit [USD] 5,000 within seven days," he said.

Whether this will be the case, and how high ETH can go "is anyone's guess," stressed Kozyakov. After the USD 5,000 mark, it "might continue going further up, it might stop in the vicinity of USD 5,000, or it might correct to some lower point. Predictions are many, and ETH has already outperformed quite a lot of them, so all that anyone can really do is keep a close eye on the market and see what will happen next."

https://cryptonews.net/en/news/ethereum/609390/

Bitcoin (BTC) held support around $56,000 over the weekend and was trading around $58,700 at the time of writing. The next resistance level around $60,000 is within reach.

The relative strength index (RSI) is now overbought on the hourly chart, although not as extreme as May 1 or April 14 which preceded price declines.
Bitcoin is holding support at the 100-period moving average on the hourly chart. The moving average has been sloping upwards for about a week which points to an improving short-term trend.
On the daily chart, bitcoin is also above the 50-day and 100-day moving averages and is not yet overbought. However, slowing momentum on the weekly chart suggests buyers are still taking profit on rallies.
For now, BTC is approaching the next level of resistance around $60,000 which has triggered short-term overbought conditions over the past few months.

https://cryptonews.net/en/news/bitcoin/605554/

Earlier today, billionaire value investor Charlie Munger, the 97-year-old Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, shared his latest thoughts on Bitcoin during a Q&A session at his company’s 2021 annual shareholder meeting.

A Recap of Munger’s Past Comments on Crypto

Over the past few years, Munger has been a harsh critic of Bitcoin.

For example, as first CNBC reported in December 2017, on 30 November 2017, at an event held by University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where Munger was a guest, when asked about his views on cryptocurrencies, he called Bitcoin “a total insanity”:

“I think it is perfectly asinine to even pause to think about them… It’s bad people, crazy bubble, bad idea, luring people into the concept of easy wealth without much insight or work. That’s the last thing on Earth you should think about … There’s just a whole lot of things that aren’t going to work for you. Figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague. And one of them is bitcoin. … It is total insanity.“

Then, on 10 Jan 2018, in a phone interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box”, he referred to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as “bubbles.”

Roughly a month later, on Valentine’s Day, at a question-and-answer session at the Daily Journal’s 2018 annual shareholders meeting, once again, Munger had no love for Bitcoin, calling it a “noxious poison.”

On 28 April 2018, Munger was again bashing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, saying — during an interview with Yahoo Finance — that those buying them were speculating rather than investing:

“If you buy something like a farm, an apartment house, or an interest in a business… You can do that on a private basis… And it’s a perfectly satisfactory investment. You look at the investment itself to deliver the return to you. Now, if you buy something like bitcoin or some cryptocurrency, you don’t really have anything that has produced anything. You’re just hoping the next guy pays more.“

On 5 May 2018, at Berskhire Hathaway’s 2018 annual shareholder’s meeting, the place where his boss called Bitcoin “rat poison squared”, this is what Munger said about trading cryptocurrencies:

“It’s just dementia… And I think the people who are professional traders that go into trading cryptocurrencies, it’s just disgusting. It’s like somebody else is trading turds and you decide, ‘I can’t be left out.‘”

The following day, during an interview with Yahoo Finance , Munger had this to say about Bitcoin:

“The computer science behind Bitcoin is a great triumph of the human mind, that’s what’s captivated all these people. They’ve created a product that’s hard to create more of but not impossible … Now that is very peculiar, but they’ve managed to do it. So, a lot of the computer science people love it just because it is such an extreme achievement of computer science. I, of course, have no interest in that because it is not my subject. And I see an artificial speculative medium, where people are buying just because they think they can sell to somebody else at a higher price even though it inherently has no intrinsic value. And so I regard the whole business as anti-social, stupid, immoral.“

More recently, on February 24, at Daily Journal’s 2021 annual meeting, Yahoo Finance correspondent Julia La Roche presented questions from Daily Journal shareholders to Munger, and a couple of these were about Bitcoin.

The first question was: “What is the biggest competitive threat to US banks like Bank of America and US Bank, both equity holdings of the Daily Journal Corporation over the long term? Is it digital wallets like PayPal, Square, or Apple Pay? Is it Bitcoin? Decentralized Finance or something else?“

Munger replied:

“Well, I don’t think I know exactly what the future of banking is and I don’t think I know how the payment system will evolve. I do think that a properly run bank is a great contributor to civilization and that the central banks of the world like controlling their own banking system and their own money supplies.

“So, I don’t think Bitcoin is going to end up the medium of exchange for the world. It’s too volatile to serve well as as a medium of exchange. And it’s really kind of an artificial substitute for gold and since I never buy any gold, I never buy any Bitcoin, and I recommend other people follow my practice.

“Bitcoin reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said about fox hunting. He said it was the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable.“

Another question was: “Has your opinion on cryptocurrencies remained the same and would the Daily Journal consider Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency as an asset on the balance sheet similar to what Tesla recently did?”

Munger answered:

“We will not be following Tesla and the Bitcoin.”

https://cryptonews.net/en/news/bitcoin/601536/

On Thursday (April 29), David Grider, Director of Digital Asset Strategy at independent research boutique Fundstrat Global Advisors, talked about Bitcoin ($BTC), Ethereum ($ETH), and the overall crypto market in the firm’s “Weekly Crypto Briefing”. In this article, we focus mostly on his comments about Ethereum.

In the firm’s latest crypto strategy note, Grider said that this week the Ethereum price had broken $2,800 to set a new all-time high. He then went on to say:

We’re maintaining our overweight Ethereum vs. Bitcoin recommendation from April 2020 and reiterating our ~$10.5k price target from January this year.

He then went on to say:

When new investors come to crypto the first asset they generally hear about and buy is Bitcoin before learning about other assets and allocating across the space. We think the same learning curve is playing out with institutional investors right now where the crypto narrative is shifting from Bitcoin to Ethereum and other segments like DeFi and Web 3 apps.

Grider says that one reason Fundstrat is bullish on Ethereum is due to “the large amounts of development happening there and the resulting economic activity in its digital economy.”

The way Fundstrat arrived at a $10,500 price target is by valuing Ethereum “on a revenue multiple basis”.

Fundstrat says that “given the correspondingly strong improvement in fundamentals”, Ethereum “still looks as cheap as it did 3 months ago at half the price”.

Featured Image by “vjkombajn” via Pixabay.com

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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