The Ethereum price has dropped by 1% today, slipping to $2,347 as the cryptocurrency market loses the same percentage in the last 24 hours.
ETH is now flat in a week and down by 14% in the past month, although it keeps a decent enough 48% increase in the past year.
These may be deflating percentages for some traders, but today also sees the news that Coinbase has officially launched Coinbase Wrapped Bitcoin (cbBTC), an ERC-20 token that Bitcoin holders can use to trade their BTC within the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.
This could result in a substantial uptick in Ethereum usage over time, something which can only be good for the Ethereum price.
Ethereum Price Explosion Looms – Here’s Why Coinbase’s ‘cbBTC’ Launch Changes Everything
Announcing the launch yesterday (because it would be bad voodoo to unveil it today, on Friday the 13th), Coinbase revealed that cbBTC would have 1:1 backing with the Bitcoin the exchange holds.
The new coin is already available and tradable on multiple DeFi platforms, including Compound, Curve, Maple, Aave, deBridge and Aerodrome, among several others.
This means it already has a big addressable market, and could quickly see significant demand and usage.
This is significant for Ethereum insofar as the ability to use DeFi services – such as lending and yield products – with Bitcoin could bring more traders into the Ethereum ecosystem, given BTC’s enduring status as the biggest and most popular cryptocurrency.
As such, we may see demand for ETH itself creep up over time, with positive implications for the Ethereum price.
And this price does need a boost at the moment, given that ETH is down today.
However, an optimist would argue that the coin’s indicators have been depressed for far too long, and that coin will be rebounding very soon.
For instance, ETH’s 30-period moving average (orange) has been below (and often well below) the 200-period average (blue) for two weeks now.
Source: TradingView
We see something similar with the alt’s RSI (purple), which fell below 30 last weekend and which has struggled to stay above 50 for very long this week.
When combined with the fact that ETH’s resistance (red) and support (green) levels are almost touching each other, we should expect a big move soon.
This may come next week, when the Federal Reserve will potentially cut rates.
This could help to boost trader positivity, which soon enough could grow into an end-of-year rally, particularly if more cuts follow.
In such a context, ETH could return to $3,000 by the end of the year.
Diversification into New High-Potential Alts
While the Ethereum price is likely to see growth again very soon, it may not experience the kind of dramatic surge that some traders chase.
In such a case, investors may prefer to diversify into newer tokens, with presale coins one route to making quick profits.
Not all presale coins will be successful but one hopeful candidate right now is layer-two project Pepe Unchained (PEPU), which has raised a very impressive $13 million in its ongoing sale.
Aiming to become a rival to existing L2s such as Base and Optimism, Pepe Unchained will offer near-instant transactions and competitively low fees.
It will focus in particular on providing a platform for meme token issuance and trading, which makes sense given its status as a meme token.
Yet Pepe Unchained isn’t relying on memes, with one source of interest likely to be the fact that, thanks to its greater scalability, it will provide double the staking rewards it would have as a normal layer-one meme coin.
The coin will come with a max supply of 8 billion PEPU, with its protocol allocating 30% to staking and 20% to its presale.
What’s also encouraging is that Pepe Unchained has already proved successful in growing its community, with the coin’s X account now boasting around 14,000 followers.
Read More: Pepe Unchained Price Prediction
This would create the impression that Pepe Unchained has more chance than more new coins of growing sustainably, with investors able to join its sale at the coin’s official website.
PEPU is currently available at a price of $0.009651 per token, with this sale price set to rise again later today.
Investors should therefore act quickly, given that all the pieces seem to be falling into place for Pepe Unchained.
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Read More from Simon Chandler on cryptonews.com
