On April 12, the Ethereum Foundation celebrated completing the Shapella update.
Due to the large number of BLS modifications at first, some blocks were missed, but stability rapidly returned.
The ecosystem was unusually quiet, despite the wild speculation about how Ether's price would react after the upgrade.
After the April 12 update, Ethereum first traded evenly, before rising on Thursday and eventually breaching the $2,000 mark. The altcoin rose further and broke beyond $2,100 on Friday of last week.
Ethereum has finally slid below the $2,000 zone, and speculation is starting to fly around again.
What other factors may come up this year, and how might they affect the price action of ETH?
Asides from the Shapella upgrade, later this year and in the following years, more Ethereum upgrades are underway.
Through these new upgrades, the existing network will slowly but surely be transformed into the lightning-fast global computer and decentralized crypto-economy it was always meant to be.
After Shapella, the Cancun Hardfork is next in line.
The Cancun hard fork's EIP-4844 is expected to introduce a feature called Proto-Danksharding (the first step toward complete Ethereum sharding).
This feature will allow rollups on Ethereum to expand their capacity by a hundredfold.
It will significantly reduce gas fees and accelerate sharding implementation.
Once this upgrade hits the mainnet, Ethereum's gas fees are expected to tank, followed by a speeding up of the network as a whole.
This will no doubt have significant effects on Ethereum's bullishness.
The Beacon Chain and Ethereum's Execution Layer combined in September of last year, creating the phenomenon known as "The Merge."
To ensure that Ethereum's consensus layer can satisfy the requirements of becoming the next global computer, however, there is still a significant amount of work to be done.
Enter Distributed Validator Technology.
DVT is a technology primitive that enables the use of more than one node or computer to run the Ethereum PoS Validator.
This enables a cluster of nodes controlled by a single operator, a collection of operators, or a community of operators to function as a single validator on Ethereum. Regardless of size, running a validator as a cluster of nodes increases its resilience while significantly lowering the danger of slashing honest validators.
As a result, staking will become more reliable and available to all validators.
When Ethereum matures further into the PoS network it was always meant to be, the price of Ether is expected to follow, and become ever more bullish.
A component of blockchain architecture known as proposer/builder separation (PBS) separates the responsibilities of block proposers and block builders.
Block construction is the process of arranging transactions into a block for submission to network validators, whereas block proposal is the submission of a block of transactions.
This improvement will not be implemented for at least another two years. However, it is expected to reduce the amount of MEV (maximal-extractable-value) activity.
Ethereum has been bearish over the better part of the week. The cryptocurrency has lost most of the gains it managed to garner after the success of the Shapella Upgrade.
CoinMarketCap data shows that the cryptocurrency has taken a 2.2% beating today alone, and is up by 0.6% over the last seven days.
Things do not look so good for the cryptocurrency in the charts either.
After taking a massive beating from the bears through last week until today, the cryptocurrency fell in a single daily candle from $2,104 to $1,9923 in an 8% decline.
A good look at the charts also shows that an ascending channel can be drawn on the cryptocurrency's price action from early November until date.
It so happens that the upper resistance of this channel coincides with the cryptocurrency's 20-day moving average (red line) as illustrated above.
Ethereum appears to have hit support at this zone and is now looking at a rebound.
If this hypothesis holds, the price targets for Ethereum are:
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