Ethereum Price Could Hit $240 By January 2020

The price of all cryptos followed the same pattern of Bitcoin (BTC) this year: the king of cryptos went up in June and the altcoins followed. Ethereum, the second most popular coin by market cap, was at its highest in 2019 at $360. Now, it's chasing $240 in January with its current price of $125, as of press time.

The fundamentals of the two top cryptos may differ. For instance, there's the "halvening" for BTC that's set to take place in May next year, and plenty of "hodlers" are banking on that event to pump prices. With ETH, on the other hand, there's no such deflationary effect. Still, those holding Ether are likely bargaining on Bitcoin's predicted rise to trickle down to the altcoin's value.

Manu Naik of AMB Crypto puts up a technical analysis-based forecast for ETH. The daily chart he highlighted showed how ETH follows a falling wedge pattern that he indicates breaks upwards most often than not -- about 68 percent of the time. Naik stated that this could lead to a short term rise for Ether.

The other technical study he laid out is the Fibonacci retracement line that ETH breached just a week ago. But since the MACD is indicating an imminent bull move, that could be tested again. Once past the 23.6 percent level, according to Naik, that puts the next Fibonacci level of 38.2 percent on the horizon with a price target of $160. Naik predicts that a price of $240 is within reach by mid-January.

Doubts on an Ethereum bull run
The recent reports of the Chinese crypto scam had caused Ether to sink 10 percent in value, which had made it the bellwether, instead of Bitcoin, for a crypto market drop on Dec. 16. Some analysts fear that despite the PlusToken Ponzi scheme being shut down, those scammers who were able to walk away with more than a billion dollars worth of stolen cryptos still contain them in their wallets, and they can manipulate ETH prices with it.

As Su Zhu, the CEO at Three Arrows Capital, puts it, "The PlusToken scammers' social media account in China now claims credit for the movement. What if they just use their $ETH transactions to PnD the market forever? 'hi, who wants to buy 200k eth from me?' 'brb, about to go lvg long eth on DeFi' '10k eth to tornado, actually nvm,'"