It is official – Ethereum has become a two-digit coin with its price dropping below the psychologically important $100 mark. It is all downhill from here and even $50 levels are in play right now. But anyone in their right mind is boggled with the logic behind this pogrom, who would sell an asset that was worth $1400 at one time for the current price of less than $100?
Many theories, little evidence for anything. Let’s examine couple of them.
- Conspiracy theories always find their place in the crypto space, you can explain a lot with them. One of the most popular ones is that big banks stand behind this unrelenting selling pressure as they want to stomp bitcoin and end the whole story around it.
- Another one, pertinent to ETH is that this demise is caused by ICO teams who are now selling the proceedings of their token sales, committing a “soft exit scam” as they become aware of how difficult it is to implement what they set out in their whitepapers. Second possible reason for ICOs to unload their ETH is to have the funds ready once SEC comes knocking on the doors with their fines for non-compliant and unregistered asset sales.
- This is, however, unlikely and pretty much debunked by TheBlock. ICOs hold around 3.57 million ETH in their wallets which makes 3.5% of the total ether supply. The sell off of the ethers ICOs hold is still not happening – they only sold around 2% of the holdings in the last 2 months, 64% in aggregate. It appears that many teams were responsible with the money and are still liquid and operational without having to use the treasury funds.
- Perhaps some believers are starting to lose faith and want to cut their losses? That is also a possibility as the adoption rate of any crypto project is almost non-existent and some people are just impatient and can’t take it anymore. Here is an example of one such buyer profile:
I bought in Nov ’17 and bought more in Jan ’18. I didn’t buy more than I could afford to lose, and as most people here, I’ve lost 75% of it. I sold what I had in Coinbase when ETH was at $130 and left the remaining cold storage ETH for now.
I’m not selling because of the price or because I don’t believe in the potential of ETH to change the world. I’m selling because I haven’t see adoption happening throughout this year, and I don’t see any ICOs coming through in the way that I hoped it would. Yes, the fact that the price dramatically dropped was a factor in me selling, but I sold because I don’t think the price will return to $130 soon, this is just my opinion.
I think the price will rise IF true adoption comes, and unfortunately all I’ve seen are crappy card games here. I don’t think true adoption will come soon because I don’t think there are enough developers to rebuild our entire infrastructure.
So I’m interested in keeping an eye on the space, and will buy back in if I see promise, but unfortunately for me, as stupid as you think I for selling, this is the financial decision I have to make now.
- People who never cared about anything but getting rich quick with little to no effort. Although most of them are already gone by now, last factions are still only now jumping the ship.
Is this capitulation?
I don’t think so. I would say that we have another leg of irrational dumps before we see the ultimate capitulation. ETH might hit the lows of $60-70 at that time. Holders will be only die-hard believers of blockchain and Ethereum, the community will regain its positivism and supporting culture it once had. The level of discourse will rise significantly as only the more educated folks will hang around to discuss technology and ideological importance of blockchain – the scammers, oil snake salesmen and other scum will be rinsed off and crypto will soon be back on track to do things it aimed to do in the first place: protect individual freedoms from shady politicians and bankers.
