Will Ethereum’s price rally ahead of DeFi Summer 2.0?

Ether’s bi-weekly gains currently stand at 30+%.

• Experts believe with the introduction of EIP 1559, ETH could soon rival BTC as a long-term store of value.
• Over the course of June, the total market cap of the crypto industry has risen by 6%.
• The creators of Norton antivirus recently unveiled that they will be allowing a select few of their users to mine Ether using their new platform called ‘Norton Crypto’.

The past couple of weeks have seen Ether continue to consolidate and showcase an increasing amount of positive financial momentum. In this regard, the premier altcoin is showcasing seven-day gains of over 15%. Not only that, even the market, by and large, is in the green currently, with the total capitalization of this space rising from AU $2 trillion to AU $2.20 trillion since the start of the month. At press time, ETH is trading at AU $3,590.

To gain a better understanding of what the future may hold for Ether, Finder reached out to Tim Frost, CEO of Yield.App, a decentralized finance (DeFi) wealth management platform. In his view, following the currency’s rise beyond the US $4K threshold recently — as well as the NFT boom — there was bound to be a period of consolidation, adding:

“Ether continues to have a much stronger use case than bitcoin: Ethereum is the first real working blockchain with the first real working cryptocurrency (Ether). For those that can appreciate that dynamic, Ether is absolutely the stronger cryptocurrency over the long term. The huge support that bitcoin is getting from major banks and asset managers can’t be ignored though, and this is going to provide strong support in the short and long-term.”

Also, looking ahead, Amber Ghaddar, PhD, Founder of AllianceBlock, believes that with the Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP) 1559 — commonly referred to as the London hard fork — all set to go live sometime next month, there is a reason to believe that Ether may rise in the near term. Not only that, she also believes that the upcoming update may take ETH in a deflationary direction, stating: “Some ETH is going to be burned … [potentially] making it more attractive as a store of wealth, allowing Ethereum to expand its target market”.
How to buy Ethereum

Norton allows users to mine crypto

In what can only be thought of as an unusual turn of events, Norton, the company known for creating a whole host of robust computer security solutions over the last couple of decades, recently unveiled its plans to cash in on the ongoing crypto adoption wave by allowing its users to mine Ether via a new feature — referred to as Norton Crypto.

The platform will initially be made available to only a small group of customers who will be able to leverage the power of their computers to mine the currency. The accumulated tokens will eventually be stored in a soft wallet solution (called Norton Crypto Wallet) and can be transferred out at a later stage.

Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing