Ethereum price analysis: Istanbul euphoria already over?

Ethereum recently did the much-hyped Byzantium hardfork this Sunday, December 8. The fork happened at block number 9,069,000. Hard forks like these are integral to Ethereum’s development. Since the project is so vast, the developers had earlier decided to launch Ethereum is four stages - Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis and Serenity. The Metropolis hardfork was further subdivided into Byzantium and Constantinople. The Ethereum Foundation decided to do an extra fork called “Istanbul” prior to the Serenity update. The Istanbul hard fork itself will have two parts to it, with the second part of the fork coming around the first quarter of 2020. 

What will Istanbul do?

The main objective of the Istanbul hardfork is to include more security fixes and incentives to move away from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake algorithm. The first part of the Istanbul hard fork will include six Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), labeled 152, 1108, 1344, 1844, 2028 and 2200. EIP 1344 will make the system resilient against Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. EIPs 1108, 2028, 220 will help reduce overall gas costs, while EIP 152 will increase Ethereum’s interoperability with equihash-based proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Zcash.

What’s the aftermath of Istanbul?

Following the hard fork, the price of ETH/USD went up from $147.65 to $151 this Sunday. However, since then, the price has dropped back down to $147.50 as the bears have made a resounding comeback. The hashrate has also dropped from 172.741 Thash/s, which is the lowest since July 2019. This is particularly worrying because, in a proof-of-work system like Ethereum, the speed and security of the network are directly proportional to its hashrate. 

Also, Parity, one of the most important Ethereum clients, announced that their users would need to apply an emergency patch before upgrading to the fork. 23% of Ethereum’s network runs using Parity. As such, not only did this delay the upgrade, but it could have also potentially caused a chain split.

Twitter Reactions

George Cao, CEO at BitMax.io:

Ethereum completed Istanbul hard fork. Congratulations @VitalikButerin and @ethereum ! BitMax announced support for the upgrade on Dec. 6, and we are happy to see the hard fork has seen widespread adoption by the community.

Kobi Gurkan:

With #ethereum Istanbul now activated, verifying proofs is much cheaper. A Groth16 proof verification costs about 200k gas (and then 8k per input) and PLONK should be similar!

Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle:

With the Ethereum Istanbul HF, ZK Rollups now possible and will allow Layer 2 scaling on Ethereum supporting upwards of 3000tps (larger than Visa), while maintaining decentralization and privacy. This is a big win for ETH-based stablecoins #usdc

ETH/USD daily chart

ETH/USD is trending inside a triangle formation and is floating below the 200-day Simple Moving Average (SMA 200), SMA 50 and SMA 20 curves. The SMA 20 curve acts as immediate market resistance. The bears have taken the price back down to $147.50 from $151. The Elliott Oscillator has had five straight green sessions. The bulls will need to defend the $146 support level.

ETH/USD four-hour chart

The four-hour ETH/USD chart is trending within the green Ichimoku cloud in a downward channel formation. The market has found resistance at the SMA 20 and SMA 50 curves. The Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD) indicates decreasing market momentum. 

ETH/USD hourly chart

The hourly ETH/USD market has found support at the lower 20-day Bollinger band and the $147.15 line and bounced up. After that, it encountered resistance at the $147.75 line and then settled around the $147.50 zone. The SMA 200, SMA 50 and SMA 20 curves are floating above the market. The Relative Strength Index (RSI) indicator is trending around 40.60.

Key Levels