Crypto trader and Twitter commentator, Josh Rager, has pointed out that with all the bullish news around Ethereum, $200 may be a total steal right now. 

The deal of the century may be staring back at you

We’ll look back in two years and talk about how sub-$200 $ETH was a gift pic.twitter.com/WhA0Y2tJAV
— Josh Rager (@Josh_Rager) February 5, 2020

Ethereum bulls can rejoice now that ETH has finally crossed back above the psychological $200 level after 5 long months. Veteran trader Josh Rager has made the salient point that at $200, ETH is still down -85.88% from it’s January 2018 all-time high of $1,417.38, and could be a great buy long-term.
Given the purge of many of the weaker projects from the platform over the crypto winter, the astonishing rise of DeFi, and the rapid pace of development on Ethereum 2.0, the #crypto seems primed for a moonshot.
Apart from the technical progress that’s being made, DeFi is creating a massive demand for ETH itself, which is the underlying collateral behind all of the DeFi smart contracts, like MakerDAO, Compound, Dharma, DyDx, etc.
All of these platforms allow users to access banking-like services through smart contracts with no middleman charging fees. They can lend, earn interest, trade, but it all needs ETH to back the smart contracts. We may see this demand cause prices to rise further.
Aside from the rising demand for ETH caused by the growth of DeFi, we might see a stampede of investors start a price war over trying to accumulate the 32 ETH necessary to participate in staking on Ethereum 2.0. Right now, staking is only live on testnets, like Prysm and Lighthouse, but as soon as it goes live on the Ethereum 2 mainnet, we may see some fireworks.
Will Ethereum investors start staking recklessly?
If the Lightning Network in its infancy was any indicator, Ethereum investors may catch a bit of reckless fever and start staking while the mainnet is still in beta development. We saw many Bitcoiners do the same thing with the earliest iterations of the Lightning Network, and funding payment channels with real BTC.
The Ethereum foundation just released a bunch of good news about the progress surrounding the audit of the smart contract for depositing ETH for Ethereum 2.0. The code has been analysed through formal verification, and has no obvious flaws.
Another huge announcement is the fact that 2.0’s beacon chain is being optimized for performance. The beacon chain will be the main blockchain that Ethereum 2’s various shards sync up to.
In addition to the technical progress made on the smart contract code, and beacon chain, Consensys and the Foundation are working out the specifics on standardizing the way that Ethereum 2’s shards will communicate and stay in sync with each other. This is a huge advance for Ethereum’s scalability improvements.
Ethereum’s limited scalability was one of the major bottlenecks in performance for the current iteration of Ethereum, one which Ethereum 2.0 aims to solve.
What do you think about Ethereum at 200, buy or dump? Let us know in the comments!

Images via Shutterstock, Twitter @Josh_Rager The post appeared first on Bitcoinist.com.