Bitcoin price rise is not a bed of roses for Ethereum investors

The recent bitcoin price rise to over USD 8,000 has been respite for market-leading crypto, and could signal a new phase for the industry. Sighs of relief are aplenty as signs of recovery are imminent after a sketchy first half of 2018. When the market shows positive signs of recovery with a bitcoin price rise, it usually has a knock-on effect to other coins and the Altcoin industry as a whole, literally propping up the industry. However, during the back-slapping and self-celebration of the past week, the news has not been too great for the second largest digital currency in the world, Ethereum.

Bitcoin price rise and shorting ether

Ethereum has long been a steadying figure in the cryptocurrency marketplace that usually reacts favorably to a bitcoin price rise. However, over the past week, the movement of Ethereum hasn’t been as expected and issues are being raised in a recent study. The New York-based hedge fund, Tetras Capital, which has approximately USD 30 million in assets under its management, recently released a report that was dedicated to shorting ether. Tetras initially began shorting ether when the price was between USD 572 ad USD 659 during May of this year. The prices as of now (July 28) is USD 470.

In the 41-page report, Tetras Capital’s founding partner, Alex Sunnarborg, said that many factors have combined to lead them to short ether such as a “a vast disparity between current speculative ETH prices and the reality of Ethereum today.” Tetras believe that an imminent launch of some groundbreaking dApps will collide with the network strain on Ethereum that will highlight both the scaling and centralization issues with the crypto. Although the current bitcoin price rise is a positive thing for the industry, the potential to short ether is very interesting. The word is that block space on the ETH network is sparse at the time being, even though they have no dApps with over 5,000 daily users.

Other issues with Ethereum

The report also suggested that ETH fees were surpassing those for BTC, and they are expected to rise even more when the highly-awaited dApps such as Augur, Gnosis and Funfair to launch in the near future. “An application call can be roughly 1 million times as expensive on Ethereum as compared to a centralized service like AWS [Amazon Web Services],” said Tetras Capital in their report. The news on the street is there is another ICO crackdown imminent, which will also affect ETH and will “dry up most of ETH demand and trigger market reflexivity.” Tetras went onto conclude that “This will lead to selling pressure as ICO investors and organizers exit ETH, furthered by decreasing ETH demand from ICOs.” A major point of contention is that Ethereum can only handle a certain amount of transitions at 15 per second, and when compared with 24,000 transactions per second from firms such as Visa, you can already see its glaring faults.

Alex Sunnarborg talked about what it would take for them to change their minds regarding exiting the short by saying, “If Vitalik and Vlad came out tomorrow and said, ‘In our sleep we developed the perfect sharding solution,’ we might change our view.” As most Altcoins twist and turn to the sound of a bitcoin price rise, Ethereum is beginning to understand the difficulties of trying to compete for top spot without the infrastructure and transaction capabilities it needs to raise its game.