Ethereum (ETH) is expected to peak at $7,609 in 2022, according to Finder.com’s latest Ethereum Price Predictions Report.
33 Finder’s panelists of fintech, cryptocurrency and NFT specialists predict ETH will peak at $7,609 in 2022, roughly 102 percent higher than its price at the beginning of the year. However, ETH is predicted to end the year at $6,500 according to the panel average.
Finder founder Fred Schebesta predicts ETH will peak at $7,000 before dropping to $6,000 by the end of 2022 due to heavy competition.
“While the network certainly has advantages in global market awareness and developer base,” he said, “it is also against increasingly strong competition that Bitcoin does not face by contrast,”
Paul Levy, University of Brighton senior lecturer, thinks ETH could go as high as $9,000 and will end the year at around $8,000.
“Ethereum, if it stays on top of technical and innovation challenges, will continue potentially erratic growth with the potential to thrive in the medium to longer term. It is an early innovation success story and that innovation potential needs to be matched by further innovation capability,” Levy said.
In the long run, the panel expects that ETH will be worth $10,810 in 2025 and $26,338 in 2030. Despite being huge gains above the current price of ETH, these are 30 percent and 48 percent lower than the panel’s projections in October 2021.
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According to one in ten panelists (11percent), Ethereum’s projected change to a proof-of-stake model (PoS) will likely result in a price decline, while 79 percent believe the move will increase ETH’s price, and the remaining 11percent believe there will be no impact or are undecided.
Vanessa Harris, Permission chief product officer, as well as Gavin Smith,The Panxora Group CEO both think the move to PoS will lead to a significant fall in ETH’s price with the former predicting ETH will be worth just $100 by 2030.
She believes Ethereum has the strongest ecosystem of any smart contract platform, but is plagued by high gas fees and low scalability. Vanessa further stated that L2s and side chains should be considered to support ETH scalability.
Smith similarly suggests that improvements provided by PoS will not outweigh the negative impact of excessive gas prices as ETH is likely to be surpassed by a number of other smart contract blockchain protocols over the next five years.
A total 19 percent of the panel are moving to sell ETH, compared to just 10 percent who are looking to sell Bitcoin. While 52 percent of the panel chose to buy ETH, 30 percent chose to hold.
Meanwhile Joseph Raczynski, a technologist and futurist at Thomson Reuters is part of the majority who says PoS will lead to an increase in ETH’s price and says ETH will cost $8,000 by the end of 2022, before reaching $15,000 by the end of 2025.
“Scalability and throughput are king, but doing this in a decentralized manner with security is critical – POS on ETH in 2022 should get them there,”Raczynski added.
CoinSmart CEO and co-founder Justin Hartzman says the real concern he has regarding PoS is the speed of its rollout but agrees in the increase in ETHs price giving a lower prediction of $7,500 for the end of 2022
“If the Ethereum 2.0 model is successful and PoS is properly implemented, we can expect ETH to moon real hard. My only concern is the speed of the rollout. Ethereum tends to be a bit slow with its updates, however, the community mostly supports any and all of their initiatives,” he said.
