In a slow week for the price of Ethereum, news was easy to come by as a series of announcements – large and small – from the likes of Fidelity Investments, Samsung, Thomson Reuters and EY gave insight into just how far this market has come.

The price of Ethereum rallied to a high of $197.99 last week in the lead up to the Devcon V conference in Osaka, Japan. Ethereum performed strongest against BTC, which saw the ETH/BTC market pair set a 1 month high of 0.023129. While the rally against USD was short lived, Ether’s performance against BTC firm, making distance on its 1 year low of 0.016080.

Devcon V, the largest developer conference in the industry, starts tomorrow and runs until October 11th. The conference, which is setup by the Ethereum Foundation and entirely dedicated to the Ethereum blockchain, will have a major focus on ETH 2 during its 4 days in Osaka, Japan. Anticipation is building for more details regarding the Beacon Chain deposit contract which is tipped to go live in a matter of weeks.

Fear and concern once again swept the cryptocurrency markets last week when the price of ETH/USD inexplicably plummeted from $189.33 to $165.12 (12.7%) within a one hour period, closing the day with the steepest 24 hour decline since early 2018.

The upcoming Istanbul hard fork could include a chain splitting EIP which introduces Programmatic Proof of Work – a change to Ethereum that would “close the efficiency gap” between GPU and ASIC mining.

ETH 2 is without a doubt the most significant development underway in the blockchain space today. Its implementation will see the world’s second largest blockchain scale upwards of 1000x, attracting an unprecedented level of development and commercial interest that has never been seen before in the industry.

Decentralized Finance is growing in leaps and bounds with the total amount of Ether locked in the system reaching an all time high of 2.74 million ETH last week.

Last week was relatively quiet in Ethereum land; the World Bank sold $33.8 million in another round of its private Ethereum blockchain bonds (not public chain activity but interesting nonetheless) and Mark Carney (Bank of England Governor) discussed the major advantages of a world reserve currency at an annual gathering of central bankers in Wyoming – drawing many parallels to that proposed by Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.

#BitBlockBoom was probably the most surreal event to occur in crypto land since the Bitconnect annual ceremony of January 2018. The event, which is a self-described conference for Bitcoin Maximalists, saw a presentation which gave a step-by-step guide to trolling and arguing with supporters of other cryptocurrencies. One slide, titled “The path to victory” closed with the statement “bully people that don’t agree with us”; and another titled “Relentless propaganda again” led with “Nocoiners must be crushed” (here’s a full transcript of the ramblings).

Last week the ETH/BTC market pair hit yet further lows, falling to a price of 0.017559 BTC as Bitcoin’s market cap dominance touched a 2 year high of 70%. This market has not seen such a price level since March 2017 with an all time high being set at 0.15 BTC in June of the same year.