Ethereum at $500 For the First Time Since July 2018: Interest Increasing

After failing to tap the $500 mark two days ago, ETH woke up from its slumber with jetpacks mounted on its back. The cryptocurrency rallied vertically and just smashed the $500 resistance against the US Dollar after more than 2 years of trading at the said rates. This comes amid a rising trend of Ethereum searches on Google.

Ethereum’s ETH Soars Straight Up To $500

It seems ETH bulls are no longer in the mood to remain in the sub-$500 zone, as a bout of galvanizing price action pushed the cryptocurrency to top the $500 mark a few minutes ago. This marks a 6 percent rise for Ethereum’s native token and an almost 200 percent gain year to date.

ETH price is trading at $500 after more than two years. The last time the crypto asset changed hands at this price was July 2018. Many in the community celebrated the move. Ethereum advocate Anthony Sassano even went ahead and said that this rally is just 5 percent of the way to $10,000.

Crypto Capital Venture founder and YouTuber Dan called for a near-term rally to $530 if ETH’s price action plays out similar to bitcoin.

Ethereum Sees Rising Search Interest On Google

While ETH is busy lifting off vertically on price charts, Google trends show that search interest in Ethereum is steadily rising.

This comes after the term ‘buy eth’ experienced a surge in search interest last week. It is probably because of all the hype surrounding Ethereum 2.0’s launch as potential buyers are looking to enter ETH markets and registers on the back of the network’s upgrade launch.

However, as per the latest update from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, ETH 2.0 might experience further delays in the launch.

When questioned about a complete timeline for sharding and the consensus migration, Buterin explained that scaling might be ready before staking.

“For the merge, I would say less than a year is not realistic. Even if a complete merge implementation fell out of the sky in February, I would recommend we sit on our butts until November or so to convince people that PoS is safe,”

Also, A Printing Of Almost 5 Million ETH Is On the Cards

In a recent AMA on Reddit’s official Ethereum subreddit, when asked about ETH’s maximum supply, Vitalik said that for the next one to two years (or until the actual merging), the network would churn out around 4.7 million coins.

Post this, the issuance will be a maximum of 2 million a year. All this supply issuance will take place until the Proof-of-Stake system is fully integrated and up and running.

The issuance schedule is ~4.7M per year for the next ~1-2 years or however long it takes until the merge, and then ~0-2M per year minus burned fees (which could be even greater than the issuance!) once PoS is fully in place. I don’t think it’s even productive to give any kind of different answer. That said, I do hope that the fact that the phase 0 code is finished and is basically just waiting for people to deposit has significantly de-risked the transition compared to eg. even six months ago!

He expressed delight at the completion of the coding for the ETH 2.0 phase 0 launch, as it has totally ‘de-risked the transition’ from Ethereum 1 to Ethereum 2.0.