Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, ended 2024 with growth of around 30%. This is a figure that is modest, compared to bitcoin (BTC) or solana (SOL), which had returns of over 100%.
According to site analysts Token DispatchNameet Potnis and Thejaswini, this difference is because Ethereum spent the year “doing something much less exciting, but perhaps more important: building.”
To support their point, the specialists gave a brief tour of what Ethereum was in 2024, focusing on the updates implemented in its ecosystem and the progress in its institutional adoption. However, despite these milestones, The price of ETH was very far from exceeding its all-time high (ATH) of $4,890, reached in November 2021.
With great ingenuity, specialists resorted to an analogy to describe the year of Ethereum: “It was like seeing a Ferrari stuck in traffic: all that power under the hood, but never finding the open road.”
The path begins with the activation of Dencun. As CriptoNoticias already explained, it is an update that brought improvements in the organization of data stored in the second layers (L2) of the ecosystem created by Vitalik Buterin. In these, the payment of commissions is cheaper than in the main chain.
“Rather than sending the price of ETH to the moon, these technical improvements had an unexpected side effect: they made Layer 2 so efficient that they began to extract value from the main chain,” the specialists noted. Furthermore, they explained:
“It was as if Ethereum had built such a good highway system that the city center had lost its value.”
Nameet Potnis and Thejaswini, cryptocurrency market specialists.
According to data from Terminal TokenL1 revenues have plummeted by 99% since March 2024:
The other big news was the launch of ether-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States. Although their performance during the first months was not as expected, they did gain significant momentum after Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections.
In this regard, specialists indicated that “2024 may not have provided the price action that ETH holders wanted, but it laid the foundation for something potentially more valuable: legitimacy.”
According to SoSoValuesince its launch on the market, The 9 ETFs accumulate more than 2.5 billion dollars.
As for the on-chain dataanalysts highlight in 2024 that more than $2 trillion in transactions will be processed on the network. In addition, it reached a total value locked (TVL) of more than $68 billion and managed to maintain its dominance in stablecoins.
It is worth noting that this stablecoin market was historically dominated by Ethereum but, recently, strong competitors like Tron appeared.
In the end, Ethereum’s “boring” year could have been exactly what it needed: an opportunity to show that it could grow without exploiting, specialists highlighted.
Bullish projections for ETH
As mentioned above, despite all these milestones, the price of ETH only managed to slightly break above the $4,000 barrier, which “created a disconcerting disconnect” because “Ethereum’s fundamentals have never been stronger, but its price “It didn’t reflect it.”
Analysts warn that this divergence was what led to Matthew Sigelan analyst at VanEck, to reduce his 2030 price target from $22,000 to $7,300, citing concerns about value leaks to layer 2 companies.
For many specialists, 2025 will be the year of the ETH breakout for VanEck and projects a relatively conservative price target of $6,000 for the fourth quarter. From the firm that manages a bitcoin and ether ETF, the second most valuable asset in the market is expected to benefit “from a regulatory renaissance under the leadership of Trump’s nominee for the SEC, Paul Atkins.”
Mads Eberhardt, analyst at Steno Research, states in a report which projects a price of at least $8,000, suggesting that ETH will surpass BTC in 2025. In this regard, it says: “Bitcoin’s market dominance will fall to 45% from its current level of approximately 56.6%.”
Markus Thielenresearcher at 10x Research, provides a contrary view and believes that ETH could “have difficulty delivering significant rallies” in 2025. As he explains, the problem is that the growth rate of validators has turned negative, falling by approximately 1% in the last 30 days.
Beyond the discrepancies, all analysts agree that ETH will reach all-time highs in 2025.
