An ATH for ETH?

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Bitcoin keeps hitting new highs. Good for bitcoin, ether says (if the asset could talk).

ETH’s price of $3,470 (as of 1:30 pm ET Thursday) is about 30% off of its nearly $4,900 all-time high (set in November 2021).

LMAX Group market strategist Joel Kruger said a weekly close above $4,000 could help accelerate the rally toward a retest of its price peak. That “could easily play out between now and year end,” he told me earlier this week.

Stocks, BTC and ETH then dipped following Wednesday’s FOMC meeting. Still, Kruger said he doesn’t expect the latest crypto asset selling to materially impact longer-term price outlooks.

CoinShares research associate Luke Nolan told me he’s eyeing February or March for ETH to hit a new high — that is, if market momentum continues and ether ETF flows remain strong.

He sees several factors working in ETH’s favor: a multi-year low in the ETH/BTC ratio; a flip in retail and institutional sentiment; and being an attractive relative value trade (given ETH is one of the few notable coins yet to hit an ATH this cycle).

On the investor sentiment piece, US spot ETH products have brought in $3 billion of net inflows since Nov. 6 (after the election). That number is $13.5 billion for spot BTC funds over that span.

BTC remains an “easier sell” for many investors given its digital gold narrative, Nolan argued. More difficult to grasp is an analogy of Ethereum as a kind of global decentralized AWS.

“It’s a slower process to get people to understand [ETH’s] value proposition,” he added. “But it seems to be happening more so now than it was when the products initially launched.”

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