Ethereum is 50% off its all-time high as of February 8, but the latest technology upgrade known as Dencun could push the price of ETH higher, according to analysts.
MN Trading founder and CEO Michaël van de Poppe said Ether (ETH), the second-largest asset in cryptocurrencies, is “awakening” in terms of price action and is likely to bounce by more than 50% soon.
Van de Poppe attributes this upcoming upward trend to Dencun, an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain architecture designed to increase data availability while enhancing transaction capacity.
People underestimate the significance of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade. If this is fully implemented into the ecosystem, it increases the likelihood that Ethereum will become the secure payment layer the ecosystem is looking for. This is a good sign that it has been released on the final testnet.
Michaël van de Poppe, Founder and CEO of MN Trading
ETH was trading around $2,400 per CoinGecko at press time, but van de Poppe predicted the price level could surge to $3,500. The cryptocurrency reached an all-time high of $4,878 per token at the peak of the 2021 bull market.
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade
Proto-danksharding is at the core of the ETH Dencun upgrade, a feature specified in EIP-4844. ETH developers touted additional features that provide benefits to layer 2 networks, most notably the introduction of an additional data field called Blob.
As crypto.news reports, this will allow L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon to access more transaction bandwidth without longer processing times on ETH’s main network.
Dencun is said to be the most significant upgrade since Ethereum evolved to a proof-of-stake model, also known as The Merge, and Shanghai enabled withdrawals of staked ETH.
Barring any delays, the developers have mentioned March 13th as the date Dencun will be released. The upgrade has been successfully deployed on major Ethereum testnets, including Goerli, Seplia, and most recently Holesky.
Another catalyst that could contribute to the rise of ETH is the potential approval of a spot ETH ETF. However, regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission delayed a decision until May, with individual members expressing differing opinions on the asset class.
