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It looks like the crypto market will be ending the year on a positive note. With considerable growth overall, we may be witnessing a return to form after a notably rough period.
With many speculating that we’re currently in a pre-bull market, forecasters are beginning to consider who will be the frontrunners in 2024. Interestingly, indicators suggest it may be the biggest year for Ethereum (ETH) yet.
ETH 2023
Since the middle of 2022, ETH has struggled to break past the $2,000 price point. After rocketing up to an all-time high of over $4,800 in November 2021 during the last bull run, ETH and the broader crypto market declined pretty quickly and stagnated throughout 2022.
At the beginning of 2023, ETH stood at around $1,190 and has now almost doubled to around $2.200 at the time of writing, a year-long gain of approximately 85%. According to analysts, ETH could reach $5,000 by the end of next year if trends continue. At the extremely optimistic end of expectations, some experts are predicting that ETH could be eyeing $8,000 by 2026.
ETH 2024
Although ETH underperformed Bitcoin (BTC) in 2023, major institutions such as JP Morgan believe that this trend will be reversed in 2024 with ETH outperforming BTC.
The historical data indicates as much. Between April 2016 and December 2023, ETH has grown by almost 20,000% from around $11 to $2,100. In that same period, BTC grew from about $500 to just over $42,000, an increase of just over 8,400%.
Though ETH isn’t considered as safe a store of value as BTC, the Ethereum blockchain itself is host to a gigantic ecosystem of Web3 services, platforms, and decentralized applications (dApps).
2024 roadmap
Over the past couple of years, Ethereum has implemented major network upgrades such as the Berlin and London hard forks. The network has had to deal with many shortcomings, but its fervor for improvement is perhaps the reason why remains one of the most popular destinations for Web3 developers and entrepreneurs.
One of the key drivers thought to be behind Ethereum’s long-term success next year is the Cancun-Deneb (Dencun) upgrade that features EIP-4844, otherwise known as Protodanksharding. This is the precursor to the full rollout of Danksharding.
Discussing the update, Ethereum developers hinted that they were shooting to run the upgrade through a testnet or two by the end of January/early February, with a view to deploy Dencun to the mainnet by the end of February.
In short, ‘sharding’ is a technique that increases network throughput, transaction speeds, and scalability, and reduces transaction fees. In the context of Ethereum, it divides the network into multiple smaller pieces, or shards, that can process their own transactions.
Danksharding skips splitting Ethereum up into multiple chains of data, and instead creates data blobs that can store more data than blocks, but are temporary data packets. It is believed that this upgrade will further improve overall network efficiency, and be especially beneficial to layer-2 networks.
A recent test to determine how well Ethereum performs after Dencun is implemented, and the results were promising, optimistically paving the way for several other EIP upgrades that are slated as part of the 2024 Dencun release.
