After a strong rally over the past year, ETH — the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin — is struggling to maintain its dominance in an increasingly crowded market.

ETH price has skyrocketed 2,500% since the start of 2020, with a market cap approaching $400 billion. Meanwhile, Ethereum’s biggest smart contract blockchain rivals, BNB, SOL, and ADA, are all growing faster as investors bet they can grab market share from big brother.

A survey of experts has put an ETH price prediction of $7,600 in 2022 – double the year-opening price.

“While the network certainly has the edge in terms of global market awareness and developer base, it also faces increasing competition that Bitcoin doesn’t face,” said Finder founder Fred Schebesta.

Accordingly, he predicts that ETH will peak at $7,000 in 2022 before falling to $6,000 by the end of the year due to “tough competition”.

In the long run, the 33-strong panel will be chosen by personal finance comparison website Finder opinion poll predicts that the price of ETH will reach almost $11,000 by the end of 2025 and will rise to $26,000 by the end of 2030. More than half (52%) of the panel think it’s time to buy ETH, while 30% “hodl” recommend investors. Only 19% think this is the right time to sell.

Meanwhile, nearly 80% of members believe that Ethereum’s shift to the long-awaited PoS model, away from the energy-intensive PoW model currently used by Bitcoin, is likely to boost the price of ETH.

“Scalability and throughput are critical, but doing it in a decentralized way that combines security is difficult and important — PoS on Ethereum in 2022 will get us there,” Joseph Raczynski pointed out.

Accordingly, he predicts that the price of ETH will rise to $8,000 by the end of 2022 and $15,000 by the end of 2025.

Ethereum will begin moving to PoS in late 2020, which is expected to help Ethereum scale, reduce fees and increase transaction times. This process is expected to be completed by June 2022.

“If the Ethereum 2.0 model is successful and PoS is properly implemented, we can expect ETH to reach the moon,” said panelist and CoinSmart CEO Justin Hartzman.

1 day ETH price chart | Source: Trade View

However, other members are not convinced and have warned that the Ethereum network’s high fees are still not going to improve.

Gavin Smith, CEO of Panxora Group said:

“PoS improvements will not offset the negative impact of excessively high gas prices. The recent change in the way gas is charged will eliminate any possibility of gas price reductions that PoS will offer.”

Ethereum usage and demand has increased over the past 18 months due to the popularity of DeFi (designed to replicate traditional financial services with cryptocurrency technology) and NFT (collections of blockchain-based technologies widely used by arts, musicians and sports). world) exploded.

However, some think that Binance, Solana, and Cardano have faster transaction times and lower fees, which could draw users off the Ethereum blockchain, where almost all DeFi and most NFTs currently operate.

In January, Wall Street giant JPMorgan warned that high transaction fees on Ethereum and the risk of network congestion would cede NFT market share to blockchain rival Solana. In addition, this could be a “problem for the evaluation of ETH”.

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