Ethereum ready for its 'London' fork while bitcoin gives ground

The second cryptocurrency by market capitalization, ethereum, falls this Monday from the two-week highs reached on Sunday, as the factors that fuel the bullish momentum in the digital asset pile up. It trades hands at $ 2,210, after it surpassed $ 2,350 on Sunday, its best change since June 18, as the 'London' update to the Ethereum network approaches. Bitcoin, for its part, is trading with falls, but experts highlight the stability of its price as one of the reasons for the rises in ether -the native token of the Ethereum network-.

The $230m ether options expiration on Friday appears to have turned market sentiment in favor of the bullish trends, at least momentarily, as investors remain cautiously optimistic about the upcoming hard fork in Ethereum and the outlook that bitcoin has established a firm market floor at around $ 30,000. The world's largest cryptocurrency is trading below $ 34,000 after climbing as high as $ 36,500 at the weekend.

As reported by 'CoinTelegraph', the DeFi (decentralized finance) market, which is largely built on Ethereum, posted cumulative gains of 9% on Sunday. The total market value of DeFi coins is $ 67.3 billion, according to Coingecko data.

THE LONDON UPDATE

The attention of the 'crypto' market is focused on Ethereum due to a series of important changes in the operation of its network, known under the name of 'London', which contains the expected EIP 1559. As reported by Cointelegraph, it will be launched on the Ropsten testnet on June 24, paving the way for full mainnet deployment later in July.

This event, known as a 'hard fork', is expected to have a positive impact on the value of ether thanks to several updates to the proposal, including the transition to green proof-of-stakes consensus and a new 'scarcity' feature that will reduce the number of tokens in circulation.

Analysts expect investors to increase their exposure to ether ahead of its upgrade. The data suggests that this is already happening, as Ethereum recorded more than 750,000 active addresses last week, outperforming bitcoin by a considerable margin.

Analytics company Santiment, which provided the data, described the active address change as "historic."

Translated by Caoimhe Toman