Ethereum (ETH) is trading at $2,413 on Wednesday as it looks to test the support level near $2,395. The current bearish price outlook could change drastically if Vitalik Buterin surprisingly emerges as an economics Nobel Prize winner on October 14.
In a recent podcast for their economic blog Marginal Revolution, economics professors Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen tipped Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to win the Nobel Prize in Economics ahead of the award announcement on October 14. The pair highlighted Buterin's role in bringing the Ethereum blockchain to life and pushing its native currency, Ether, to a market capitalization of over $290 billion at press time.
"Vitalik has built a platform, created a currency, you could say refuted Mises’ regression theorem in the process, obviously following in the footsteps of Satoshi [Nakamoto]," said Cowen. "He writes on monetary economics, and there's no economist who has anything better to say on the topics he writes on. And that, to me, is worth a lot in this consideration."
"I think you would have thought [Bitcoin and Ethereum] were impossible if you had thought about it in advance, yet they're actually working in the real world," added Tabarrok.
Although unlikely, Ethereum's price could stage a major rally if Vitalik lands the award on October 14.
Meanwhile, Ethereum has been posting exchange net inflows since October 5, while its exchange reserves have been trending upward during the same time, per CryptoQuant data. This indicates that selling pressure is dominant among investors and could continue rising.
Ethereum Exchange Reserve
A similar trend is seen in ETH ETFs, which posted net outflows of $8.1 million on Tuesday, per Farside Investors data. Unlike crypto exchanges, outflows in ETFs signify selling pressure and vice versa for inflows.
Ethereum trades near the $2,400 psychological level on Wednesday, down slightly by 1% following $16.64 million in derivatives liquidations — with long and short liquidations accounting for $10.84 million and $5.80 million in the past 24 hours, per Coinglass data.
The top altcoin has been consolidating since bouncing off a key descending trendline on October 3. Buyers are finding it difficult to overcome a strong resistance near $2,490. This resistance is strengthened by the 50-day Simple Moving Average (SMA), staying just above it.
ETH/USDT daily chart
As a result, ETH is attempting to test the $2,395 support level of a key rectangle channel.
A bounce off this level could see ETH stage a rally above $2,490 to test the resistance near $2,707. If ETH completes such a move, it will look to reclaim the $2,817 level, which held as key support for about four months following the market consolidation between April and July.
However, if ETH fails to move above the $2,490 resistance, it could break the $2,395 level and decline toward the support near $2,200.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Awesome Oscillator momentum indicators are just below their neutral levels at 50 and 0, respectively. At the same time, the Stochastic Oscillator is a few points off its oversold region. This indicates a slight dominant bearish bias in the ETH market.
A daily candlestick close below $2,200 will invalidate the thesis.
Ethereum is a decentralized open-source blockchain with smart contracts functionality. Its native currency Ether (ETH), is the second-largest cryptocurrency and number one altcoin by market capitalization. The Ethereum network is tailored for building crypto solutions like decentralized finance (DeFi), GameFi, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), etc.
Ethereum is a public decentralized blockchain technology, where developers can build and deploy applications that function without the need for a central authority. To make this easier, the network leverages the Solidity programming language and Ethereum virtual machine which helps developers create and launch applications with smart contract functionality.
Smart contracts are publicly verifiable codes that automates agreements between two or more parties. Basically, these codes self-execute encoded actions when predetermined conditions are met.
Staking is a process of earning yield on your idle crypto assets by locking them in a crypto protocol for a specified duration as a means of contributing to its security. Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism on September 15, 2022, in an event christened “The Merge.” The Merge was a key part of Ethereum's roadmap to achieve high-level scalability, decentralization and security while remaining sustainable. Unlike PoW, which requires the use of expensive hardware, PoS reduces the barrier of entry for validators by leveraging the use of crypto tokens as the core foundation of its consensus process.
Gas is the unit for measuring transaction fees that users pay for conducting transactions on Ethereum. During periods of network congestion, gas can be extremely high, causing validators to prioritize transactions based on their fees.