Ethereum whales confident – Scam could threaten ETH’s price

• A new scam reported by Primitive Capital’s partner, Dovey Wan, could threaten the ETH price.
• An increasing number of Ethereum whales could potentially signal a growing confidence in an upward trend for Ether (ETH).
  

With the 24-hour chart in green (3.8%), Ethereum‘s price still struggles along with Bitcoin and the rest of the market to maintain its support level of $340. At the moment of publication, ETH is trading for $345 with significant losses with the last week (26.6%) and over the last month (10.4%).

Analysts currently disagree about the outlook for ETH, though there are also some bearish voices. The situation in the market could also further negatively influences  by the emergence of a new scam that has been reported. Primitive Capital’s partner, Dovey Wan, posted via Twitter that the Forsage scam already has had a negative impact on the Ethereum price performance.

At the same time, Wan rejected the theory of many analysts that DeFi sector has contributed largely to the price gains of ETH. Wan stated the following, after monitoring Forsage’s scam activity:

(…) just for whoever lives in CT bubble: the ETH price floor is not from a few foodcoin scams or potential defi vault explosion, sadly is from the liveness of Forsage, the ongoing $ETH version Plustoken. But it’s a classic ponzi using ETH as on-ramp and has been top 3gas consumer for past 4 months

Wan is one of the crypto-space commentators who are skeptical about DeFi. The Primitive Capital partner indicated that Forsage began in the Philippines and that it’s a classic operation for a crime of its nature. The scam, Wan reported, uses ETH as an access ramp and has been flagged by Philippine authorities as a Ponzi scheme for several months.

Wan has not only rejected the reasons attributed to the upward trend of recent months but declared the scams as the “main drivers of the upward cycles”. In that sense, Wan hopes that the price of ETH won’t suffer when the scammers are caught:

(…) as long as these scammers are not being arrested like the Plustoken ppl are, there shouldn’t be an abrupt sell-off (like what happen at the 2019 top, the sell off literally happened the second day when Plustoken core team were arrested and the whole ponzi collapsed)

Ethereum’s whales are confident about an upward trend

The scam referred to by Wan is consistent with the predictions of the analyst Credible Crypto. Via Twitter, he indicated that he expects a drop of the ETH price. Also, the trader has predicted that XRP will outperform ETH in the coming months. The analyst believes that XRP could reach new highs after the current correction in price.

People are starting to take notice 😏 I’ll say it again- expect $XRP to outperform $ETH over the coming months. Has nothing to do with fundamentals or my affinity towards either coin- just the charts, plain and simple. https://t.co/k8aY58Znh3

— Credible Crypto (@CredibleCrypto) September 8, 2020

In opposition, research firm Santiment has reported an increase of “Ethereum whales” that could potentially signal a growing confidence in an upward trend. As can be seen in the graph below, whales have increased their ETH stockpile by 84% in the last 30 days. ETH addresses attributed to the whales have increased from 3.16 million to 5.80 million ETH.

Source: https://twitter.com/santimentfeed/status/1303406417290780673

In that regard, Messari researcher Ryan Watkins believes that Ethereum is undervalued. Watkins based his arguments on the high transaction fees the platform has seen in recent months. Due to congestion and high network usage, sending a transaction on Ethereum’s network has become an expensive process. Messari’s researcher stated the following, emphasizing the effect that the launch of the Ethereum 2.0 will have on the price of the cryptocurrency:

At this point ETH is probably undervalued even just considering it purely as a capital asset. Annualizing Ethereum’s last 30 day’s fees implies ETH trades at 20x earnings. Remember ETH in PoS with have a claim on those fees.