Analyst who called bitcoin's rebound says ether could hit $10,000

·Senior Writer

October 21, 2021 at 6:46 AM·3 min read

Bitcoin exploded to a new all-time high Wednesday just one day after the first-ever bitcoin-linked exchange traded fund (ETF) started trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) saw more than $550 million dollars pour into the new futures-linked product in its debut trading day.

That enthusiasm, in part, helped push bitcoin's price (BTC) to a new all-time high north of $65,000 Wednesday morning. Now, one analyst at Fundstrat Global Advisors says that enthusiasm is likely to spill over into pushing the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, ethereum, well past its own prior record.

Fundstrat's Head of Digital Asset Strategy Sean Farrell told Yahoo Finance Live he expects ether (ETH-USD) to not only move past its prior all-time high of about $4,200 set back in May, but potentially all the way up to $10,000. As his new research note highlights, outsized moves in bitcoin tend to precede following peaks in ether.

"What we've seen in prior bull market cycles for bitcoin is that bitcoin generally leads the rally, capital rotates, investors take their gains and rotate into altcoins, with the most predominant heavily-traded altcoin being ethereum," Farrell explained. "And quite frankly, we think that a lot of people are overlooking ethereum into the end of the year, just due to the fact that bitcoin has garnered the lion's share of headlines."

Bitcoin dominance, a metric used to measure bitcoin's share of the total cryptocurrency space, has historically rallied ahead of ether's price breakouts, according to Fundstrat's latest analysis. Thereafter, ether's price, charted in BTC (right axis) has historically risen.

While that may be true, Yahoo Finance previously highlighted an earlier $10,000 price call for ether from Magnetic Managing Director Megan Kaspar. Both Kaspar and Farrell point to the same underlying catalyst for their bullish price targets — ethereum has planned deflationary changes to its network looming.

"You don't meet the average investor that is aware of recent software updates in the ethereum network," Farrell said. "Recently, they updated the network with what was called EIP 1559, in which transaction fees are actually burned, causing a disinflationary effect. And what we've seen with the recent NFT craze is that all of the non-fungible tokens that have been minted and traded on the ethereum network have actually led to a rapid increase in the amount of ethereum's supply burn."

Kaspar has since reiterated her $10,000 price target for the same reason. She predicts that when the next remaining network change goes into effect, potentially sometime around the first quarter of 2022, it would carry roughly the same impact as three bitcoin "halvings." A "halving" is defined as when the bitcoin block reward paid to miners is cut in half roughly every four years as dictated by bitcoin's code. It also has historically kicked off the bull cycle for bitcoin's price moves, just as it did most recently in the spring of 2020.

Ether breaking out above $4,000, as Farrell's latest research note highlights, "should not face much resistance at $4410, but likely surpass this and rally to targets near $4951, with additional technical projections up to $5826."

Whether bitcoin's recent rally continues to feed ether's momentum remains to be seen. Ether jumped 9% Wednesday to top $4,100 after the ProShares bitcoin-futures ETF began trading Tuesday.

Farrell and his team at Fundstrat also maintained their earlier $100,000 year-end bitcoin price target, and predicted a potential move to as high as $168,000 if the historic inflows to the new bitcoin ETF continue.

Zack Guzman is an anchor for Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer covering crypto, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

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