But none of that matters if you’re considering owning Ethereum. What it does is that the smart contracts platform is poised to move up or peak 10 months ago.
Ethereum has been worth more than $3,500 several times before. In the year It reached that level on at least seven occasions in 2024, and briefly topped $4,000 in May and December. Even those spikes didn’t set records — there was a brief visit to Ethereum’s all-time high of $4,892 in November 2021.
A simple review of the cryptocurrency price chart suggests that it follows a four-year cycle Bitcoin (Crypto: BTC) Halve events. Ethereum prices rise about a year after each bitcoin halving, rise for another year or so, and then fall into a crypto winter. If the market repeats that pattern, timing, Ethereum and other cryptos are at the beginning of a new bull market.
There are several issues with this chart-glance analysis, however.
Let’s forget the price chart for a minute. What is going on in the Ethereum project, and what could it mean for owners, users and investors in the long run?
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are essentially encrypted transaction ledgers, managed by publicly available computer networks. But basically they serve different purposes.
Bitcoin provides a digital currency that can be used for payments and due to its ever increasing value and limited supply, its value must increase from time to time.
Ethereum is the functional coin of the giant, global computer. Smart contracts included in its transactions are automatically executed, performing a wide range of digital functions based on real-world data. This functionality is an integral part of decentralized finance (DeFi) systems that take financial processes out of the bank and into your smartphone.
As such, the value of the coin is not subject to a strict supply limitation. It’s all about smart contracts, with lots of use cases, millions of daily users and a huge amount of actual Ethereum transactions. Every transaction happens in someone’s blockchain wallet or in a decentralized game and so on – and the transactions result in gas payments. Some of the tokens used to pay those fees were “burned” – permanently removed from circulation. The rest goes to owners who share Ethereum coins, allowing them to verify and secure transactions on the blockchain. Importantly, you can pay additional gas fees to execute your smart contracts faster, which will lead to significant price increases as Ethereum-based applications go mainstream.
Moreover, Ethereum is always improving its software. Upcoming updates include tighter security, changes that should result in cheaper transaction fees, and later game-changing improvements to the technical foundations. These incentives are needed to fend off challenges from young and fast smart contract platforms. Building a global market for decentralized applications is a shame. Solana (Crypto: SOL) And Cardano (Crypto: ADA) Get all the long-term benefits of your career.
Missing from this overview is a timetable for the take-off of decentralized finance applications. With or without help from the price trends of Bitcoin tenants, the true value of Ethereum will not be clear until we see the first killer applications of the DeFi and Web3 movements.
Pinning an exact price on a digital marketing tracking network is difficult, especially in a rapidly changing market that includes so many credible options.
That said, I am convinced that DeFi and Web3 will revolutionize personal finance around the world. Disrupting the giant banking industry will be a difficult task, but it may be inevitable. The financial systems you use every day in 2025 have been around for decades, even centuries, and there are better tools available these days.
And despite many challengers, Ethereum remains the leader of the smart contracts pack. Many signs point to a healthy consumer community. More than half of the crypto value locked up in app development projects is the Ethereum market. There are nearly 300 million active Ethereum addresses, up from 130 million four years ago.
The network effect of that rapidly expanding group of users should drive Ethereum’s value higher over time. According to Metcalfe’s law, the value of any network grows as the square of the number of participants. This value formula was applied to telecommunications networks in the 1980s, but has also been applied to the Internet, social networks, airport networks, and financial services.
On that note, I expect Ethereum’s real-world value to rise as more people embrace quick and cheap solutions to age-old financial problems. I can’t promise that $3,333 is the best purchase price ever. Still, I see a bright future for this crypto community in the long term, and the coin should build value over the years.
In the year Ethereum may or may not skyrocket in 2025, but it doesn’t matter. I suggest keeping this encryption for a long time.
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Anders Bylund It has positions in Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum and Solana. He has a spot in the Motley Fool and recommends Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, and Solana. The Motley Fool has Disclosure Policy.
Should You Buy Ethereum Below $3,500? Originally published by The Motley Fool.
