For the third consecutive day, Ethereum has been one of the top-performing crypto assets while its big brother has taken a break. A slight fall back for bitcoin was not mirrored for ETH so has the world’s second most popular crypto asset finally started to decouple?
Ethereum Touches $200
Following a bullish weekend and a big ‘Bart pattern’ on Monday, Ethereum resumed its upward momentum to touch the psychologically significant $200 level on a number of exchanges during early Asian trading.
A dip back below $190 to touch the 50-hour moving average caused concern that the bulls had run out of steam. These fears quickly dissipated when a large hourly candle propelled ETH over 4% to reach the resistance at $200. The asset has retreated marginally over the past few hours but appears to be holding this level.
A golden cross has just formed on the four-hour time frame with the faster 50 moving average crossings above the slower 200 MA signaling a trend reversal. It reverses a two-month downtrend that began in early July and resulted in ETH dumping around 50% down to $165.
The daily chart is showing the opposite but now that prices have crossed the 50 day MA and are moving towards the 200-day indicator at $205 this could soon be reversed.
There are other bullish signals for Ethereum such as a consistent exchange net outflow for the third time this year which could indicate accumulation and has been followed by a strong rally.
Over the past week, $ETH printed consistent exchange net outflows for *only* the 3rd time in 2019.
Someone has been shopping🛒🛒🛒 pic.twitter.com/GmNKr7LLHF
— Ξlias Simos (@eliasimos) September 16, 2019
Some traders are turning bullish on Ethereum and have noticed that it has made this move without any assistance from its big brother.
“$ETH gets above $200 without $BTC and we will see alts move higher… Honesty PA looks good right now. I think we could see $500 EOY.”
$ETH gets above $200 without $BTC and we will see alts move higher…
Honesty PA looks good right now.
I think we could see $500 EOY.
— Cactus (@thecryptocactus) September 16, 2019
$500 in the next three months sounds a little optimistic since it hasn’t been there since July 2018. However, there could be a return to previous 2019 highs around $350 if the momentum can be maintained and ETH can finally decouple from BTC.
Bullish ETH Fundamentals
There have been a number of other bullish fundamentals for Ethereum over the past week such as the successful networking of several ETH 2.0 clients in the ‘eth2interop’, further developments with DAI and the DeFi ecosystem which is heavily ETH dependent, Santander’s $20 million bond issued directly onto the Ethereum blockchain, and the news that BitPay will be supporting ETH payments.
This is all without any official rolling out of Serenity phases so there is a long way to go for Ethereum yet and the decoupling may just be beginning.
Will ETH prices hit $500 this year? Add your thoughts below.
Images via Bitcoinist Image Library, Twitter: @eliasimos, @TheCryptoCactus, ETH/USD charts by TradingView
