by Rushali 
In the cryptocurrency market, Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoins by market capitalization. It touched its all-time high of $1439.33. The last time ETH was above $1400 on Jan 13, 2018. Ethereum’s YTD gains now total 66.15% over 6x higher than the leading cryptocurrency and leaving behind both Polkadot (DOT) and Chainlink (LINK). Despite experiencing a temporary correction, it is still one of the strongest performers among the top 10 assets.
There are no fundamental reasons for this new ATH, ETH is close to breaking the key level for over two weeks after climbing to $1,350 on Jan. 10. The Defi market is growing day by day, today its value stands at $24 billion worth of crypto assets in its protocols and it is behind the bull run of the market. Now, the ETH is moving towards the mark of $2000, these coming 3 things will help it reach there.
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1. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world’s largest derivatives market has announced on Dec 16 that they are planning to launch ETH futures by Feb 8 after it receives regulatory approval from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This new cash-settled financial product – which means any profits made will be paid out in US dollars as opposed to the ether – comes three years after the exchange launched bitcoin futures, which is now the world’s most traded bitcoin futures product and accounts for over 20% of all open contracts.
With this new launch, the market will react to it positively and will definitely help ETH to reach $2000.
2. For any action related to ETH, it needs a transaction fee to encourage miners to process them. Right now, transaction fees are determined via an auction-style system where users who attach the highest fees to their transactions get them processed the quickest by miners. This system causes a number of issues, namely unpredictable and often extremely high fees during periods of heavy congestion. Many times network congestion happens whenever there are lots of actions happening at a time.
Now, an Ethereum Improvement Proposal put forward by the project’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin, along with developers Eric Corner, Ian Norden, Rick Dudley, and Matthew Slipper, to implement changes to the way ether transaction fees are presented to users, as well as the management of ethereum’s supply which is called EIP 1559. It will invent a BASE FEES. The BASE FEE aims to introduce a uniform fee across all ethereum-centric platforms and services that rises and falls depending on network activity.
This will automatically boost the sentiments of the investors.
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3. Ethereum is moving towards the up-gradation to Ethereum 2.0. It has 4 phases Phase 0, Phase 1, Phase 1.5, and Phase 2 – each laying the technical foundation for the next until the final phase is completed.
In phase 0 we have got the implementation of the Beacon Chain, a new blockchain layer that will coordinate activity between individual Ethereum shard chains on Dec 1. Now it’s time for phase 1 in which we will see the launch of 64 shard chains. The benefits of this new system will be that transactions won’t need to be validated by the entire network, only by a single shard chain. This will greatly reduce the time it takes to confirm transactions, and it means the overall network will be capable of handling significantly higher volumes without suffering the level of congestion it currently does.
There is no fixed date for the launch.
