Ethereum price
Earlier this week, there was an upward move above the $97-100 resistance zone in the ETH/USD pair. Between Dec 15 and 17, Ethereum price had gained a considerable 23%, which led it to hit the highest level since Dec 9 before slowing down by Tuesday.
In the next 24 hours, another 11% surge was recorded, pushing the trade volume to a remarkable $2.51 billion. By Dec 19, Ethereum price was in a bullish trend with the coin trading at $104.66. The price formed an intraday high at $107.81, however, faced resistance at the $110 level and slid downside to below the $104 level.
Aside from the price, the Ethereum market cap also saw a significant rise with the market cap recorded at $10.87 billion, which marked a $2 billion hike from the $8 billion at the beginning of the week.
Until today, Ethereum price remained well bid against USD and Bitcoin. If the price manages to stay above $97, it could gain more above the $104 resistance level. A break above $107 next week could push the price towards $110 or $112.
The recovery occurred only a few days after the official announcement by Ethereum developers regarding the release of Ethereum’s Constantinople hard fork, which is scheduled to take place in Q1/2019 around Jan 16. According to a tweet by the core developer of Ethereum Foundation Peter Szilagi, the hard fork will take place at block #7080000.
Ethereum development
Aside from anticipation for the release of the Constantinople hard fork, a new update for Ethereum, called Ethereum 1.X is also scheduled to release during June 2019 if no delays take place.
This update is supposedly a replacement of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). According to Vitalik Buterin, “Ethereum 1.x, short-term scalability improvements that are going on to the main chain, before we can switch over to sharding. That whole effort started without my involvement at all.”
Another notable development this week was when Opera - one of the world’s leading web browsers - finally released an update that added an Ethereum-based crypto wallet and Dapp explorer to its browser on Dec 20.
This launch comes as the latest in a series of developments aimed at integrating cryptocurrency functionality across Opera’s browser platforms, demonstrating the company’s intentions to adopt next-generation technology. The integration of Ethereum wallets on Opera desktop browser was announced earlier this year.
Industry experts see this event as an essential effort to better improve Dapp accessibility, introducing Web 3.0 to mainstream audiences and encouraging developers to adopt blockchain and build on Ethereum.