This is how Ethereum price could react following the shutdown of Ropsten network

• Ethereum development team announced that the Proof-of-Stake test network would come to an end by December 15-31 this year.
• Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom also expanded to Ethereum this week.
• Ethereum price recently reclaimed a critical support level which could initiate an almost 11% rally.

Ethereum will soon end the very testnet that began the journey of transition from Proof-of-Work (POW) to Proof-of-Stake (POS). However, at the same time, Ethereum’s reach is expanding to a wider user base as well. These developments could neutralize the impact on Ethereum price, which is looking to achieve a recovery.

Ethereum Proof-of-Stake testnet reaches the end of line

Ethereum’s development team, in a blog post on November 30, announced that the Ropsten network would soon be shut down. The POS testnet had been deprecated as infrastructure providers stopped supporting the network over the last couple of months. At the same time, validator participation also dropped and continues to decline.

Thus by December 15-30, Ethereum will shut down the vast majority of remaining active validator nodes. After this, Ropsten will officially no longer be supported by the clients or testing teams. Following Ropsten, the team also confirmed that the Rinkeby testnet would be next to be shut down by sometime in mid-2023.

Users and developers will have until then to migrate their applications to either the Goerli or the Sepolia testnets. Purpose-specific testnets have been the norm for the Ethereum community, where future EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) upgrades are deployed to check for bugs.

However, this does not indicate reduced interest or demand for Ethereum. Evidence of the same can be found in the fact that just a day ago, on November 29, Solana-based crypto wallet Phantom announced an expansion to Ethereum. 

Along with the biggest DeFi blockchain, Phantom is also set to reach Polygon. Commenting on the wallet, the CEO of Phantom, Brandon Millman, said,

“I think we really do have what it takes in terms of just being able to taste that amount of scale and understand what it needs and what is required to run a wallet from an operational perspective.”

Ethereum price preparing for a hike

Ethereum price noted a 6.47% increase in market value over the last 24 hours, trading at $1,286. The second biggest cryptocurrency is at the cusp of an upswing, but it would need to breach some crucial resistances to achieve it.

The altcoin already flipped the $1,279 level into a support floor, and a bounce off of it will push ETH toward $1,320. If Ethereum price breaches this critical resistance, it will be on the path of initiating a rally. This uptick would see the cryptocurrency tagging the range of $1,345 to $1,427, labeled as the Fair Value Gap (FVG), constituting an 11% rally.

ETH/USD 4-hour chart

But if the altcoin loses buying pressure, Ethereum price could close below the immediate support at $1,291 and tag $1,277. Further decline would result in a retest of the critical support at $1,159, a daily candlestick below, which would invalidate the bullish thesis. Consequently, ETH could end up tagging the lows of $1,084.