Nearly half of retail crypto investors in the U.S. believe that Ethereum can outperform Bitcoin in the long term, with industry analysts giving a bullish outlook for ETH over the next 12 months.
CryptoVantage surveyed U.S. residents who have invested in cryptocurrencies over the past five years. A total of 1,000 people were surveyed, of which 46% believe that ETH has the potential to outperform BTC in terms of price. Meanwhile, 70% of them expect Bitcoin to return to its all-time highs within the next five years.
Fidelity Digital Assets analysts also give a bullish forecast for Ethereum for the coming year in the Q2 2023 Signals Report. They note that since the beginning of the year, the asset has increased in value by 62%, and the overall supply of ETH since September 2022 has decreased by more than 700,000 tokens. According to Glassnode, the number of new active addresses on the network grew, and the number of active Ethereum validators increased by 15% in Q2.
The impetus for further ETH growth is also provided by expectations related to the EIP-1153 proposal to be implemented in the upcoming Dencun update. It’ll improve the efficiency of smart contracts, reduce costs, and expand the design of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This innovation should have an impact on the decentralized exchange (DEX) sphere, where Ethereum’s dominance has declined from 60% to 46% within six months, according to DefiLlama.
Fidelity analysts also cite Laevitas’ quarterly futures data, which displays professional traders’ lack of confidence in ETH. This is reflected in the premium on three-month futures, which is only 4%, below the neutral threshold. Traders are also reluctant to use leverage to open long positions in ETH. Based on these data, the document assumes the possibility of altcoin quotes falling below the $1,200 mark in the short term, which doesn’t cancel out the bullish outlook for the longer term.
Among the factors that should affect the growth of ETH quotes is the recent announcement and prospects for the launch of Uniswap v4, which dominates the market with a share of about 70%.
