Ethereum Price Forecast: ETH Hard Fork Scheduled for October 17
Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are shining brightly at the moment, but that may not be helping the Ethereum price forecast. For one thing, ICO regulations are extremely murky and can change at the drop of a hat.
But more than that, ICOs are possibly blinding investors from other, more important Ethereum news.
For instance, ETH prices should have appreciated when core developers finalized the date of Ethereum’s hard fork, but there was zero impact. How is that possible?
The Byzantium hard fork is supposedly a major milestone for Ethereum. It will add privacy features to the blockchain, giving investors in security-obsessed altcoins a reason to migrate their funds into Ethereum (I’m looking at you, Zcash!).
The fork will officially go live on October 17. However, we could see some Ethereum nodes update their software as early as next week. Why? Because they were instructed to by an extremely powerful collective of Ethereum developers.
These developers are employed by the non-profit Ethereum foundation, which looks after the platform’s long-term interests. If you want to form an accurate Ethereum price forecast, it makes sense to watch what these folks are doing—they control 69% of all ETH nodes.
With them pushing the Byzantium hard fork, we can safely assume it will happen.
But none of this will translate to gains in Ethereum prices unless investors start paying attention. This writer humbly suggests a little less attention towards obscure ICOs, and a little more to what truly matters: the scalability of the Ethereum platform.
Perhaps then we’ll see the Ethereum to USD exchange lift off from around $292.60.
Analyst Take:
When markets are wrong in the short term, investors have an opportunity to make money. So even if it is frustrating to watch ETH prices run in place, I believe that market forces will eventually return to reality. When that happens, triggered by Devcon 3 or the hard fork, we could see ETH surge towards our Ethereum price prediction of $1,000.
Also Read: Hold on to Ethereum for the Long Term
