Ethereum rode on a wave of soaring cryptocurrencies, skyrocketing 3.5 percent on Friday to reach an all-time high of $4,403.93 and break its May record of $4,379.62.
By Friday night, however, ETH is trading at $4,382.05, which up 0.86 percent in a 24-hour period, as per a real-time tracker on Coindesk.
Ethereum has long been considered as the blockchain with the most use cases, having more than 3,000 decentralized apps in its platform. The elevating ETH price likewise coincides with the token's latest Altair upgrade, which was successfully enabled earlier this week.
After Bitcoin attained its all-time high of around $66,000 over a week ago, other altcoins have also rallied, with Binance and Solana regaining lost value, Hypebeast reported. In particular, Solana has performed outstandingly together with Polkadot, as investors see the arrival of another altcoin surge.
Bitcoin, however, had since suffered a correction, precariously hitting around the $60,000 levels in recent days. On Friday, it has recovered slightly, trading at $62,051.60, an increase of 0.67 percent in the last 24 hours, as per Coindesk.
Ethereum Price Prediction: Experts See ETH Value to Peak at $50000 by 2030
With Ethereum's surge, a panel of cryptocurrency experts interviewed by Finder forecasted that ETH could top $5,000 per coin by the end of 2021, and could peak at over $50,000 by 2030.
These experts estimate an average Ethereum price prediction of $5,144 by the end of 2021, which is about a 20 percent rise from current prices. It is then expected to soar to $15,364 by 2025, and then triple its worth to $50,788 in 2030.
Crypto ATM operator CoinFlip founder Daniel Polotsky commented in the report that ETH enjoys this rosy forecast since it is doing a "better job of supporting development on its blockchain" and will flaunt "a more lightweight proof-of-stake mining model than Bitcoin." As such Ethereum could be the backbone of Web 3.0, he added.
Ethereum Forecasted to Surpass Bitcoin in the Next Decade
Polotsky also predicted that Ethereum value will exceed Bitcoin in the next decade.
A crypto-powered Web 3.0, evolving from the Silicon Valley tech-focused Web 2.0, would have the blockchain economy as its foundation, Forbes noted in a report.
Peer-to-peer platform Origin Protocol co-founder Joshua Fraser sees Ethereum as one of the "main financial settlement layers of the world" in the future. The Ethereum blockchain, he said, hosts a "large but still quickly growing alternative financial system," residing in the decentralized finance apps running in the platform. As such, Ethereum price will "reflect this future reality."
Late in 2020, Ethereum started to shift from its proof-of-work security and validation model to the current proof-of-stake, one that may transform the token into being more efficient and less energy consuming. This transformation is ongoing and not expected to be completed until 2022. Such proof-of-stake model offers miners more scalability and profitability in the blockchain.
Ethereum price has already rose 1,000 percent year-on-year, with a market capitalization hitting above $500 billion. This is due to the exponential growth of DeFi apps that recreate traditional financial services using crypto tech that won't need the help of banks, and the popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), wherein digital media and assets are tokenized on the blockchain.
