Ethereum Price Preview: August 10 – August 16
Welcome to the Ethereum Price Preview, an analysis of current and upcoming market events and how they might shape the price of ETH and the trajectory of the network.
The cryptocurrency bull run has stalled slightly with ETH price testing and re-testing $400 at multiple points over the last week. Bitcoin, too, has found itself stuck at the $11,000 to $12,000 range briefly breaking out upwards before falling back in line. Let’s take a look at the factors impacting Ethereum price for the week ahead.
Aave Credit Delegation Goes Into Production
In the DeFi space, multiple projects announced progress over the past week. The Aave money protocol saw the first live test of its Credit Delegation functionality, a process that allows users to open lines of credit and assign them to another party.
This is significant as it allows users to tap into the assets currently “locked” in DeFi and increase capital movements and liquidity in the space. Users sign an agreement with the OpenLaw digital contracts platform to legally assign the credit.
Credit Delegation is one way DeFi users may be able to source liquidity from a protocol to other areas of both DeFi and traditional finance without requiring collateral from the borrower, potentially creating a more robust and sophisticated financial ecosystem (albeit now with credit risk).
The total value locked in DeFi now stands at a record $4.74 billion, after crossing the $1 billion mark just two months ago. The total amount of ETH leveraged in DeFi now stands at 4.47 million – or 3.99% of the circulating supply of ETH.
The market capitalization of all DeFi tokens has also now reached a record high of $9 billion, with Ethereum network volume at yet another all-time high as the bull run continues in earnest.
Last week Ethereum also had its 5th year anniversary, which coincided with the blockchain’s aggregate transaction volume nearing an incredible $1 trillion.
At the time of writing, ETH price is testing the $400 mark, with a market cap of $43.82 billion, the highest its been since July 2018.
Major Corporate Adoption for Ethereum
We’ve seen significant announcements already over the last few weeks. In July, Visa hired an Ethereum developer and began rolling out support for cryptocurrencies, confirming that the world’s leading payment provider is adopting crypto. All US banks also became legally licensed to hold cryptocurrencies for their clients and offer full custodian services.
This trend continued when last week it was revealed that Coca Cola’s North American bottling supply chain group, CONA Services, is adopting the Ethereum mainnet to handle logistics.
CONA will use Baseline Protocol to establish a “Coca Cola bottle harbor” to streamline transactions and onboarding processes between different bottling companies. Baseline Protocol is built on Ethereum and CONA data will be stored on Ethereum to create “an integrated, private, distributed integration network.”
The project will roll out in Q4 2020, bringing yet more mainstream attention to the Ethereum network. CONA generates $21 billion in annual revenue, and its adoption of the Ethereum network in vital logistics and supply chain processes will likely serve to further legitimize Ethereum in the eyes of corporations, regulators and institutional investors.
Reddit Scaling Competition Nears Close
Last month Reddit invited Ethereum scaling projects to showcase their scaling solutions and demonstrate how they could be used to bring Reddit community points to Ethereum. Reddit is a leading news and social media aggregator with 1.5 billion visits per month and is ranked as the 18th most visited website.
Reddit prediction markets are now working to predict the winner of the challenge, with Matter Labs (zkSync) currently in the lead.
22 projects have responded to the challenge so far, and it’s possible that the winning solution will be incorporated into Reddit’s Community Points architecture as a result.
Media Roundup
ETH 2 coordinator and pioneer, Afri Schoedon, will be talking today at EDCON2020 with a presentation titled “Final Road to Ethereum 2.0: Multi-Client Testnets”.
Bitcoin Malaysia is hosting an event on August 10 called Welcome to the Agricultural Age of Crypto. The event comes as part of Southeast Asia DeFi Week #2. The week-long event will feature high-profile speakers from many major projects.
Speakers include Compound founder Robert Leshner, Aave Founder Stani Kulechov, MyEtherWaller CEO Kosala Hemachandra, as well as founders from Curve Finance, Paraswap, Balancer, and other projects. The event will serve as an introduction to DeFi and a discussion of its many use cases.
IC3 is hosting an event called Crystals and Mud on the Blockchain on August 11. The event will be led by James Grimmelmann, the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. Grimmelmann’s work covers digital copyright, search engines, online governance, and other related topics. The IC3 event will explore the challenges in introducing trustlessness and removing ambiguity and personal discretion from blockchain technology.
ETHGlobal is hosting the Randomness Summit on August 13. The summit is an online conference about randomness beacon research and deployment. Randomness is an essential aspect of encryption and secure transactions among other online processes. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin will give a talk at the event, as will Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet, DEDIS Lab head Prof. Bryan Ford, and IPFS Core Developer David Dias among other speakers.
Honduran organization BUIDL Tegucigalpa is leading an event called Decentralized Exchanges and Matcha on August 13. The event features 0X Labs Product Manager Fulvia Morales, as well as Aragon One’s María Gómez. The event will focus on decentralized exchanges as well as the future of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. All of the above events are hosted online.
Subscribe for weekly Ethereum insight.
