In 2020 so far, Ether price has surged 53%. These gains were primarily the result of an upswing recorded last month.

In the past seven days, the price of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap dropped 5.37% and still remains in the red while trading just under $200.

However, Ethereum traders on the crypto exchange Bitfinex are betting on another uptrend.

For starters, as we reported, the amount of Eth held on Bitfinex, which continues to climb to new highs, also topped at 5 million ETH in May. ETHUSD long positions on Bitfinex have also hit their all-time high.

“Ethereum long positions @bitfinex, little affected by Covid19, are up 90% since the beginning of the year,” noted analyst Mati Greenspan.

ETHUSD short position also climbed significantly last week only to tank down to the October 2019 levels and is nowhere near its peak in January 2019.

For Ether to head higher in the next few weeks, trader Credible Crypto says, the digital asset has to hold its current level.

It could make its way downwards only if bitcoin dumps hard, in that case, it would find support around $150-$160.

$ETHBTC – Finally coming into the level I wanted to speculate buying ETH

Really needs to hold this level otherwise most likely it drops down to the yearly open as the next level of interest

If btc starts breaking down then not sure why ETHBTC will hold up pic.twitter.com/Y69qEBW9L7

— TraderXO (@TraderX0X0) May 14, 2020

Interestingly, Santiment found that the market cap of stablecoin DAI, currently at $3.86 million, often “foreshadows” the price of ETH.

“This is often overlooked because as a stablecoin, DAI's price is always pegged at (or near) $1. But not its marketcap. DAI’s levels are now staying fairly level around 110M.”

Meanwhile, the Ethereum network is experiencing high usage with its transaction count more than doubled since February. The number of transactions climbed to 894k last week, up from 428k in January 2020.

90% of Ethereum network is already in use and this spike in activity only leads to a backlog of more than 90,000 pending transactions. This caused Coinbase’s ETH and ERC20 transactions to be temporarily halted.

As such, fees that remained below $0.2386 for the past few months have been steadily moving up to $0.55 since April. In May, the fees saw a spike of 282%.

Also, gas prices skyrocketed over the past month, currently up 4x since the end of April to 41 Gwei.

Besides the increasing popularity of Ethereum applications like stablecoins and DeFi, this rise in activity on the network could be because of a Ponzi scheme, MMM Global, which offers 1% returns on investment per day.

MMM Global, which is the 7th largest holder of Paxos Standard stablecoin on Ethereum, was also responsible for consuming 8.5% of daily gas in April.

In other news, there is much debate on the launch date of Ethereum 2.0.

Previously, June 2020 has been declared the month when ETH 2.0 will be launched and then recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin replied with “I think so” about July release only to later clarify that he didn’t hear the word “July.”

Yeah I did not say July. Perhaps the question contained the word July but I did not hear July when it was asked.

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 12, 2020

ETH 2.0 test coordinator, Afri Schoedon also took to Twitter to share that “The final spec is not implemented in any client and we didn’t launch a coordinated testnet yet.”

During the same event, ETH 2.0 project lead Danny Ryan said the network’s multi-client approach is contributing to the project launch delay.

“The multi-client paradigm brings in the additional complexity to get things to the mainnet,” he said. “If we had one client, maybe we would be in mainnet already.”

Ethereum (ETH) Live Price 1 ETH/USD =$197.4642 change ~ -2.33%

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