Ethereum Breaks $200 Levels Eyeing 50% Surge, Ethereum 2.0 Brings Critical Advances

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum is showing strong momentum northwards and has gained over 30% over the last week. In the last seven days, the ETH price has jumped from sub $180 levels to now above $220.

With this Ethereum has successfully managed to break its critical resistance of $220 and is now eyeing 50% further upsurge with a target of $350.

Last year in 2019, Ethereum lost all its price gains of Q2 2019 by the end of the year putting it back to square one. However, the start to 2020 has been pretty good. Since January 1, 2020, ETH has added nearly $100 to its price with its graph showing a smooth uptrend.

At press, Ethereum (ETH) is trading at a price of $217 with a market cap of $23.88 billion. Ethereum’s recent price movement can be attributed to the considerable progress of the Ethereum 2.0 project which is now getting closer to reality.

In his recent blog post, Ethereum developer Danny Ryan said that Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0, also popular as the Beacon Chain, is now stabilized. Additionally, he also stated that the Ethereum Foundation has successfully completed a Formal Verification (FV) of Ethereum 2.0 deposit smart contract bytecode.

“Runtime Verification recently completed their audit and formal verification of the eth2 deposit contract bytecode. This is a significant milestone bringing us closer to the eth2 Phase 0 mainnet,” he wrote.

Besides, the developer is also continuously working on optimizing the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain is the main reference chain for the Ethereum 2.0 project. To solve the major issue of scalability, we know that the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain network shall be broken in smaller mini-blockchains or subgroups called Shards. Each of these shards have to remain in sync with the Beacon Chain to stay with its peers as well!

The Ethereum 2.0 Lighthouse testnet recently shared a major bug and was successfully running 100K validator nodes without any hassle. Another similar implementation called the Prysm testnet has also run 35,000 validator nodes.

On the other hand, the Ethereum Foundation has also released $65,000 grant to one of the ETH 2.0 client and infrastructure project Nimbus. Speaking to The Block, Nimbus’ head of research Jacek Sieka said: “We have been making good progress on Nimbus and this grant enables us to not only continue our R&D of the ETH2.0 client, but also explore additional areas of focus which can make Nimbus an even more versatile and important piece of infrastructure and accelerate the upcoming development phases.”