VanEck Investment Management presented three scenarios
for the Ethereum perspectives by 2023. The primary scenario suggests that
Ethereum prices could surge to $11,849 per coin. According to the Bearish
scenario VanEck sees ETH prices going down to the bottom of $343, while the Bullish
scenario assumes prices may sky rocket to $51,006 per coin by the end of this
decade. This is a rather strange divergence between scenarios that highlights
that even large investment houses don’t understand where the price will really
go.
Meanwhile,
crypto enthusiasts are queuing to bring money into the ETH 2.0 network in order
to become a transaction validator and to get passive income from it. Newcomers
have to wait for at least 665 hours to become a member of validators’ team. The
number of nodes in a queue is nearing 50,000 with active nodes at 572,000. With
this number of newcomers, ETH blocked in the blockchain could increase by 1.6
million coins. Nobody has been seen to exit the network at the moment. The more
tokens deposited in the network for the long-term, the stronger deflation and the support for the ETH prices will be.
The U.S.
Internal Revenue Service filed a claim for $44 billion against the collapsed
FTX crypto exchange. Considering the fact that the taxman is always the No 1
priority in a long queue of creditors, other claims could take a long time to
be fulfilled, or unlikely to ever be executed.
The overall
macroeconomic situation in the markets is very tense. The U.S. Ministry of
Finance said it is unable to pay the U.S. government bills before the debt
ceiling issues are resolved with Congress. The S&P 500 broad market index
is moving inside a narrow intraday range without any significant volatility
during the last six months. Thus, large players expect volatility to surge
dramatically and that the debt ceiling issue will be resolved by early June. In
the unlikely case of a U.S. default, all risky assets will suffer severely,
including cryptos. However, investors always look for a safe haven in the
United States during turbulent times, even when the country is the origin of
this turbulence. Nonetheless, negative developments would put stocks and
cryptos into a down spin.
The Federal
Reserve (Fed) continues to send out signals that it may keep its interest rates
unchanged by the end of 2023, and even hike them in case of inflation spikes.
Inflation is slowing down, but it could hardly drop below the 2% Fed target.
This may require quite a lot of time for the Fed to finally anchor prices below
this target.
BTC prices
are looking towards $24,000 where investors may receive good opportunist to buy
the coin. This might be true for altcoins too, as they are likely to follow
Bitcoin price movements. The current meme-coins rally could slow down the crypto
market correction, but when it is over cryptos could rush downward to catch up
with stocks.