Major Cryptocurrency Investors Are Betting Heavily Against Ethereum

[Hydrogen]

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency platform in the world, has seen its currency plummet 36% this year. But some major crypto investors think it has more room to fall, and they're betting aggressively against it.

New York-based Tetras Capital, a crypto hedge fund that launched last summer and is known for in-depth analyses of cryptocurrency prices, has shorted ether, borrowing the coins and hoping they tank so it can buy them back at a lower price. Tetras started shorting ether in May 2018, when the price ranged from $572 to $659. Ether currently hovers around $470.

Last week, Tetras published a 41-page report explaining its reasoning. Forbes estimates the six-person hedge fund has $30 million in assets under management. The ether short is one of its two high-conviction positions—the other is its bitcoin investment, says founding partner Alex Sunnarborg.  

Timothy Young, a former entrepreneur who sold tech startup Socialcast for more than $100 million in 2011, is shorting ether through his San Francisco family office, Hidden Hand Capital. Hidden Hand has more than $100 million in crypto assets under management. And Bay Area hedge fund Neural Capital also has a short position, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ethereum aims to be a global computing platform, but investors like Tetras and Hidden Hand are concerned that its $48 billion market cap isn’t justified, largely because the network can only handle about 15 transactions per second. By contrast, Visa can handle 24,000 transactions per second. “Ethereum has an incredible talent pool of developers,” Young says. “In the long term, I think they’ll solve a lot of scaling challenges. But in the short term, there’s a disconnect between the price and underlying technology.” Sunnarborg agrees, saying, “Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good investment.”

Ethereum isn’t controlled by a single company, and decentralized applications (DApps) run on top of it. None of these apps have more than 5,000 daily active users, yet the network is nearly at full capacity. Network congestion can cause the fees required to use the platform to skyrocket.

For example, to perform a simple step in the Ethereum-based game CryptoKitties, where users can create digital memorabilia, it might cost $3. Those costs rose higher than $20 at the end of 2017. “An application call can be roughly 1 million times as expensive on Ethereum as compared to a centralized service like AWS [Amazon Web Services],” Tetras wrote in its report.

Ethereum developers are working on several solutions to improve network capacity. The Tetras team thinks significant improvements are too far off. “The most optimistic estimates suggest that Ethereum’s Layer-2 and other broad scaling solutions will not be fully functional, tested, or capable of supporting the most popular DApps for roughly another two years,” Tetras’ report reads.

Jake Brukhman, founder of Brooklyn-based crypto asset manager CoinFund, disagrees. He has been holding ether since July 2015, and the asset has historically made up between 20% and 42% of his firm’s first fund. Among Ethereum's nearer-term scaling solutions like “state channels,” which allow transactions to happen more quickly, off the Ethereum blockchain, “a ton of improvements are coming to market this year,” Brukhman says. “As a blockchain technology, Ethereum still remains the largest ecosystem of technologies, tools and developers.”

Some data suggests that few investors are closely monitoring Ethereum’s technological progress. Casper and Plasma are two technical updates that will help speed up Ethereum transactions. “Casper and Plasma publish their meetings, and they still have less than a few hundred views on YouTube,” Young says. “I don't think most people are either taking the time or have the technical background to really understand.”

Other big-name investors are on the fence about ether. Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, says he’s “seriously considering” shorting it, but is already betting against ripple and litecoin and isn’t ready to add more short exposure. Longtime crypto investor and CoinShares chief strategy officer Meltem Demirors is “neutral” on ether. “We are nowhere near a bear market yet,” she says, although she thinks demand for Ethereum-based tokens and applications is largely speculative. “In the absence of more Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announcements in 2018, I won’t look to add more exposure.”

Tetras goes into many other reasons for its short in its report. Other well-funded Ethereum competitors like EOS, Dfinity and Tezos have recently come online or are planning to launch later this year. “EOS just raised $4 billion, and you can pay teams to build applications,” Sunnarborg says. “I don't think people with big bags [investments] are going to let that die.”

Tetras also thinks the ICO boom has driven ether’s price up, since many ICOs accepted only ether from interested investors. Those ICOs are at risk of a regulatory crackdown, “which will dry up most of ETH demand,” the report predicts.

Sunnarborg believes ether would need to become a better store-of-value asset to live up to its valuation. He sees bitcoin as the more likely winner as the top store-of-value crypto asset, due to “crucial characteristics, including: security, political and architectural centralization, monetary supply, regulation, and liquidity,” he says.

What would it take for Tetras to change its mind and exit its short? “If Vitalik and Vlad came out tomorrow and said, ‘In our sleep we developed the perfect sharding [scaling] solution,’ we might change our view,” Sunnarborg says.

Or if a regulatory ruling gave Ethereum a competitive advantage—for example, if other platforms like NEO or Dfinity were classified as securities—he would rethink the position. He doesn’t see the SEC’s recent statement that Ethereum isn’t a security as an indicator of a competitive advantage, because the ICOs that launched on top of Ethereum are still at risk of being deemed securities.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/07/25/why-major-cryptocurrency-investors-are-betting-heavily-against-ethereum/

....

Some interesting analysis and breakdowns on ethereum's platform. The majority of ethereum content posted on this forum is pro eth. There isn't much said on eth from the opposite perspective and so I hope people will not mind me sharing this. I tried to bold most of the relevent points but tbh the whole thing could be worth reading for anyone interested in these topics.

It looks as if the majority of investors are shorting ethereum under the expectation that it is overvalued and overpriced. They could majority wise expect the price to decrease. Over the short term that could be the trend we'll see, especially if a majority of larger institutional investors have formed a consensus on this.

Note how the quoted portions attempt to support their stance with facts and analysis. I think this attempt @ a rational overview is what was missing from the "bitcoin is a bubble" and "bitcoin is a tool for criminal and money launderers" hysteria which pervaded the media awhile ago. Could be something to consider in the days to come when media stories are aired without much if any attempt at verification.

[1714078725]

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[SimpleBitMaker]

Some data suggests that few investors are closely monitoring Ethereum’s technological progress. Casper and Plasma are two technical updates that will help speed up Ethereum transactions. “Casper and Plasma publish their meetings, and they still have less than a few hundred views on YouTube,” Young says. “I don't think most people are either taking the time or have the technical background to really understand.”

Thanks for sharing this. This part in particular is a little bit worrying to me. We know a lot of people have jumped into crypto doing little or no research, and that contributed to all that volatility in such a short time.

I myself am into Ethereum but am starting to have a few doubts after seeing this. A speculative price cannot hold up against an actual price if there is nothing fundamental backing the asset, and that might be the case for ETH if this scaling problem is in fact an issue. However, this is just one side of it like you said and more research is needed.

[LeGaulois]

ECR20 tokens helped Ethereum a lot! Perhaps without this ETH wouldn't be in the top 2 on coinmarketcap. I know there is Plasma to help with the scalability issue but the problem is nobody is aware of it.
Casper and Plasma get very little views on their video because of no one care! The majority is buying cryptocurrencies without reading the white paper, so why should they start to watch videos to follow the development?
Remember when the scalability issue with Bitcoin was a hot topic? The same will apply to ETH. Now, it depends on how Plasma could be know

[butka]

All things considered, having just 36% reduction of the ETH price this year is great. The only thing that keeps Ethereum from plummeting even further is the flow of seemingly countless ICOs that appear out of thin air every day. This simply cannot last forever. Moreover, if these ICOs were to switch to NEO, EOS, WAVES, or some of the other platforms that compete for the same market, nothing will prevent the Ethereum downfall. Some of these platforms offer better decentralization and much lower fees, so it won't be long before this happens. Ethereum has had the advantage of being the first to offer their decentralized application solution, but it is just a matter of time before a better practical solution takes over. On top of this, all we have seen so far is just constant postponing of their supposed PoS/Plasma/Casper improvements.

[alyssa85]

The biggest risk to Ethereum is all those ICOs being banned, because most of them were built on top of Ether's platform.

Looking at ethereum's chart, it's fallen less than other altcoins. So a 36% drop isn't that bad. I wonder whether Tetras Capital have gone public with their short to encourage other investors to sell...

[player514]

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency platform in the world, has seen its currency plummet 36% this year. But some major crypto investors think it has more room to fall, and they're betting aggressively against it.

New York-based Tetras Capital, a crypto hedge fund that launched last summer and is known for in-depth analyses of cryptocurrency prices, has shorted ether, borrowing the coins and hoping they tank so it can buy them back at a lower price. Tetras started shorting ether in May 2018, when the price ranged from $572 to $659. Ether currently hovers around $470.

Last week, Tetras published a 41-page report explaining its reasoning. Forbes estimates the six-person hedge fund has $30 million in assets under management. The ether short is one of its two high-conviction positions—the other is its bitcoin investment, says founding partner Alex Sunnarborg.  

Timothy Young, a former entrepreneur who sold tech startup Socialcast for more than $100 million in 2011, is shorting ether through his San Francisco family office, Hidden Hand Capital. Hidden Hand has more than $100 million in crypto assets under management. And Bay Area hedge fund Neural Capital also has a short position, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ethereum aims to be a global computing platform, but investors like Tetras and Hidden Hand are concerned that its $48 billion market cap isn’t justified, largely because the network can only handle about 15 transactions per second. By contrast, Visa can handle 24,000 transactions per second. “Ethereum has an incredible talent pool of developers,” Young says. “In the long term, I think they’ll solve a lot of scaling challenges. But in the short term, there’s a disconnect between the price and underlying technology.” Sunnarborg agrees, saying, “Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good investment.”

Ethereum isn’t controlled by a single company, and decentralized applications (DApps) run on top of it. None of these apps have more than 5,000 daily active users, yet the network is nearly at full capacity. Network congestion can cause the fees required to use the platform to skyrocket.

For example, to perform a simple step in the Ethereum-based game CryptoKitties, where users can create digital memorabilia, it might cost $3. Those costs rose higher than $20 at the end of 2017. “An application call can be roughly 1 million times as expensive on Ethereum as compared to a centralized service like AWS [Amazon Web Services],” Tetras wrote in its report.

Ethereum developers are working on several solutions to improve network capacity. The Tetras team thinks significant improvements are too far off. “The most optimistic estimates suggest that Ethereum’s Layer-2 and other broad scaling solutions will not be fully functional, tested, or capable of supporting the most popular DApps for roughly another two years,” Tetras’ report reads.

Jake Brukhman, founder of Brooklyn-based crypto asset manager CoinFund, disagrees. He has been holding ether since July 2015, and the asset has historically made up between 20% and 42% of his firm’s first fund. Among Ethereum's nearer-term scaling solutions like “state channels,” which allow transactions to happen more quickly, off the Ethereum blockchain, “a ton of improvements are coming to market this year,” Brukhman says. “As a blockchain technology, Ethereum still remains the largest ecosystem of technologies, tools and developers.”

Some data suggests that few investors are closely monitoring Ethereum’s technological progress. Casper and Plasma are two technical updates that will help speed up Ethereum transactions. “Casper and Plasma publish their meetings, and they still have less than a few hundred views on YouTube,” Young says. “I don't think most people are either taking the time or have the technical background to really understand.”

Other big-name investors are on the fence about ether. Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, says he’s “seriously considering” shorting it, but is already betting against ripple and litecoin and isn’t ready to add more short exposure. Longtime crypto investor and CoinShares chief strategy officer Meltem Demirors is “neutral” on ether. “We are nowhere near a bear market yet,” she says, although she thinks demand for Ethereum-based tokens and applications is largely speculative. “In the absence of more Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announcements in 2018, I won’t look to add more exposure.”

Tetras goes into many other reasons for its short in its report. Other well-funded Ethereum competitors like EOS, Dfinity and Tezos have recently come online or are planning to launch later this year. “EOS just raised $4 billion, and you can pay teams to build applications,” Sunnarborg says. “I don't think people with big bags [investments] are going to let that die.”

Tetras also thinks the ICO boom has driven ether’s price up, since many ICOs accepted only ether from interested investors. Those ICOs are at risk of a regulatory crackdown, “which will dry up most of ETH demand,” the report predicts.

Sunnarborg believes ether would need to become a better store-of-value asset to live up to its valuation. He sees bitcoin as the more likely winner as the top store-of-value crypto asset, due to “crucial characteristics, including: security, political and architectural centralization, monetary supply, regulation, and liquidity,” he says.

What would it take for Tetras to change its mind and exit its short? “If Vitalik and Vlad came out tomorrow and said, ‘In our sleep we developed the perfect sharding [scaling] solution,’ we might change our view,” Sunnarborg says.

Or if a regulatory ruling gave Ethereum a competitive advantage—for example, if other platforms like NEO or Dfinity were classified as securities—he would rethink the position. He doesn’t see the SEC’s recent statement that Ethereum isn’t a security as an indicator of a competitive advantage, because the ICOs that launched on top of Ethereum are still at risk of being deemed securities.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/07/25/why-major-cryptocurrency-investors-are-betting-heavily-against-ethereum/

....

Some interesting analysis and breakdowns on ethereum's platform. The majority of ethereum content posted on this forum is pro eth. There isn't much said on eth from the opposite perspective and so I hope people will not mind me sharing this. I tried to bold most of the relevent points but tbh the whole thing could be worth reading for anyone interested in these topics.

It looks as if the majority of investors are shorting ethereum under the expectation that it is overvalued and overpriced. They could majority wise expect the price to decrease. Over the short term that could be the trend we'll see, especially if a majority of larger institutional investors have formed a consensus on this.

Note how the quoted portions attempt to support their stance with facts and analysis. I think this attempt @ a rational overview is what was missing from the "bitcoin is a bubble" and "bitcoin is a tool for criminal and money launderers" hysteria which pervaded the media awhile ago. Could be something to consider in the days to come when media stories are aired without much if any attempt at verification.

It makes sense why there is hesitance to use ETH rather than Bitcoin from investors. Ethereum is more centralized, more risky, loses more of peoples money, down more often, and always will be. Their blockchain is bloated. It grows faster than many users can download it. It’s very likely falling and other solutions will not “work” if you care about immutability/trustlessness. There’s nearly no demand for the Ethereum gas you’re supposed to buy to process transactions, because no one really uses it for computing, it’s just speculative platform utility. And the biggest reason why bitcoin is better than ethereum is that Ethereum will always have more consensus failures than bitcoin. It has a larger attack surface, and competing implementations.

[hatshepsut93]

This anti-ETH sentiment is caused by competitors like EOS and Cardano who market themselves as Ethereum killers. Last year everyone loved ETH and criticism was very rare, but now that competitors have launched their networks, the FUD bombardment has begun. I personally wouldn't be 100% bearish on ETH, I think in some very long run it will lose to BTC, if Bitcoin will get smart contracts, sidechains and other features, simply because Bitcoin is more decentralized and secure, but in the shorter perspective ETH at least has some proven track record of developers doing their job, while its competitors are still very young.

[SimpleBitMaker]

This anti-ETH sentiment is caused by competitors like EOS and Cardano who market themselves as Ethereum killers. Last year everyone loved ETH and criticism was very rare, but now that competitors have launched their networks, the FUD bombardment has begun. I personally wouldn't be 100% bearish on ETH, I think in some very long run it will lose to BTC, if Bitcoin will get smart contracts, sidechains and other features, simply because Bitcoin is more decentralized and secure, but in the shorter perspective ETH at least has some proven track record of developers doing their job, while its competitors are still very young.

That's a good point, there are many out there who would benefit financially from making ETH look bad. It's not as unstable as they would like it to appear, probably. It's also got a bit of seniority in the very young market, which is commendable (although not a good enough reason to make it invulnerable).

It doesn't look like it's ready to go anywhere, but it just might not be as hyped up as we thought it was last year. Although we could say similar things about other altcoins, even bitcoin as well. The reality check stage is starting to hit, and that's why everyone is working hard to make their coins have real world application and trust.

[Nisharawal]

Don't believe what hedge funds so they are just manipulating your minds and funds so that you take their advice seriously and do you really think that hedge fund managers have said truth i don't think so. They might have shorted in order to reduce their risk in order to hedge their positions and funds if there is any kind of panic selling starts that's it. I think Ethereum has still some kind of potential left to start taking part in the bull rally and i will expect a bullish rally soon in Ether charts.

[Gracie12]

If the price of eth does not rise so high, do you think the encryption market will be so hot? Eth represents blockchain 2. It brings blockchain revolution.

[Panda Trump]

This anti-ETH sentiment is caused by competitors like EOS and Cardano who market themselves as Ethereum killers. Last year everyone loved ETH and criticism was very rare, but now that competitors have launched their networks, the FUD bombardment has begun. I personally wouldn't be 100% bearish on ETH, I think in some very long run it will lose to BTC, if Bitcoin will get smart contracts, sidechains and other features, simply because Bitcoin is more decentralized and secure, but in the shorter perspective ETH at least has some proven track record of developers doing their job, while its competitors are still very young.

Indeed, but we should embrace competitivity and dump ETH for its better counterparts. That is how we got our advanced society to where it is nowadays in the first place.

There are multiple games currently played on the ETH blockchain and another batch of ETH games are set to release in the near future... How is the blockchain gonna react to that? Fees go up again, transaction times go up again, its utility goes down and it makes no sense to use it anymore. Bitcoin will win from Ethereum in the long run. Its direct competitors will win from Ethereum in the long run.

Maybe Ethereum will keep its value for now, maybe for years, but I doubt it will be much longer than a couple years untill the Ethereum blockchain seems useless in comparison with the more advanced blockchains.

[Kprawn]

When Bitcoin bounced back again and when there was a small indication that it will spike, the price of Ethereum plummeted,

so that tells me a lot of Ethereum investors are more than willing to dump their Ethereum, if they think that Bitcoin is going to

rise up again. I predict a total collapse of Ethereum IF this happens, because there are not enough investors that are

backing Ethereum as a long-term investment. Most still own coins that they received, when they participated in these ICOs.

[cabalism13]

Just an ALTCOIN passing by...
Ignoring ETH...
Still, Hello BITCOIN.

Though ETH  is the way of transaction of Altcoins, and it may be the reason why ETH is still alive therefore we can conclude that without altcoins ETH wouldnt survive and it will not have the same value thatvit has now.  And yet, maybe the reason why it wasn't pumping up right now is because there aren't some new ICOs in the market right now, almost half of the number of altcoins is just a shitcoin...

[wxa7115]

....

Some interesting analysis and breakdowns on ethereum's platform. The majority of ethereum content posted on this forum is pro eth. There isn't much said on eth from the opposite perspective and so I hope people will not mind me sharing this. I tried to bold most of the relevent points but tbh the whole thing could be worth reading for anyone interested in these topics.

It looks as if the majority of investors are shorting ethereum under the expectation that it is overvalued and overpriced. They could majority wise expect the price to decrease. Over the short term that could be the trend we'll see, especially if a majority of larger institutional investors have formed a consensus on this.

Note how the quoted portions attempt to support their stance with facts and analysis. I think this attempt @ a rational overview is what was missing from the "bitcoin is a bubble" and "bitcoin is a tool for criminal and money launderers" hysteria which pervaded the media awhile ago. Could be something to consider in the days to come when media stories are aired without much if any attempt at verification.

It is an interesting read, like always Hydrogen, what I find interesting is that nowhere in the content you posted includes the most common complains against ethereum coming from the community, the first is the lack of limit in the emission of coins and without a limit Ethereum cannot be considered a store of value since in that aspect it is the same as fiat, and even more importantly the fork that created ethereum was different than the forks of bitcoin, the forks of bitcoin happened mostly as an attempt from opportunistic people to gain money out of it or in the case of bitcoin cash they wanted to take a different road to solve the scaling issues, but the fork of ethereum was created because its users disagreed with the way the hacking of the DAO was handled since they believe, and I believe as well, that the blockchain should not be tampered with.

[darewaller]

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency platform in the world, has seen its currency plummet 36% this year. But some major crypto investors think it has more room to fall, and they're betting aggressively against it.

New York-based Tetras Capital, a crypto hedge fund that launched last summer and is known for in-depth analyses of cryptocurrency prices, has shorted ether, borrowing the coins and hoping they tank so it can buy them back at a lower price. Tetras started shorting ether in May 2018, when the price ranged from $572 to $659. Ether currently hovers around $470.

Last week, Tetras published a 41-page report explaining its reasoning. Forbes estimates the six-person hedge fund has $30 million in assets under management. The ether short is one of its two high-conviction positions—the other is its bitcoin investment, says founding partner Alex Sunnarborg.  

Timothy Young, a former entrepreneur who sold tech startup Socialcast for more than $100 million in 2011, is shorting ether through his San Francisco family office, Hidden Hand Capital. Hidden Hand has more than $100 million in crypto assets under management. And Bay Area hedge fund Neural Capital also has a short position, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ethereum aims to be a global computing platform, but investors like Tetras and Hidden Hand are concerned that its $48 billion market cap isn’t justified, largely because the network can only handle about 15 transactions per second. By contrast, Visa can handle 24,000 transactions per second. “Ethereum has an incredible talent pool of developers,” Young says. “In the long term, I think they’ll solve a lot of scaling challenges. But in the short term, there’s a disconnect between the price and underlying technology.” Sunnarborg agrees, saying, “Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good investment.”

Ethereum isn’t controlled by a single company, and decentralized applications (DApps) run on top of it. None of these apps have more than 5,000 daily active users, yet the network is nearly at full capacity. Network congestion can cause the fees required to use the platform to skyrocket.

For example, to perform a simple step in the Ethereum-based game CryptoKitties, where users can create digital memorabilia, it might cost $3. Those costs rose higher than $20 at the end of 2017. “An application call can be roughly 1 million times as expensive on Ethereum as compared to a centralized service like AWS [Amazon Web Services],” Tetras wrote in its report.

Ethereum developers are working on several solutions to improve network capacity. The Tetras team thinks significant improvements are too far off. “The most optimistic estimates suggest that Ethereum’s Layer-2 and other broad scaling solutions will not be fully functional, tested, or capable of supporting the most popular DApps for roughly another two years,” Tetras’ report reads.

Jake Brukhman, founder of Brooklyn-based crypto asset manager CoinFund, disagrees. He has been holding ether since July 2015, and the asset has historically made up between 20% and 42% of his firm’s first fund. Among Ethereum's nearer-term scaling solutions like “state channels,” which allow transactions to happen more quickly, off the Ethereum blockchain, “a ton of improvements are coming to market this year,” Brukhman says. “As a blockchain technology, Ethereum still remains the largest ecosystem of technologies, tools and developers.”

Some data suggests that few investors are closely monitoring Ethereum’s technological progress. Casper and Plasma are two technical updates that will help speed up Ethereum transactions. “Casper and Plasma publish their meetings, and they still have less than a few hundred views on YouTube,” Young says. “I don't think most people are either taking the time or have the technical background to really understand.”

Other big-name investors are on the fence about ether. Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, says he’s “seriously considering” shorting it, but is already betting against ripple and litecoin and isn’t ready to add more short exposure. Longtime crypto investor and CoinShares chief strategy officer Meltem Demirors is “neutral” on ether. “We are nowhere near a bear market yet,” she says, although she thinks demand for Ethereum-based tokens and applications is largely speculative. “In the absence of more Enterprise Ethereum Alliance announcements in 2018, I won’t look to add more exposure.”

Tetras goes into many other reasons for its short in its report. Other well-funded Ethereum competitors like EOS, Dfinity and Tezos have recently come online or are planning to launch later this year. “EOS just raised $4 billion, and you can pay teams to build applications,” Sunnarborg says. “I don't think people with big bags [investments] are going to let that die.”

Tetras also thinks the ICO boom has driven ether’s price up, since many ICOs accepted only ether from interested investors. Those ICOs are at risk of a regulatory crackdown, “which will dry up most of ETH demand,” the report predicts.

Sunnarborg believes ether would need to become a better store-of-value asset to live up to its valuation. He sees bitcoin as the more likely winner as the top store-of-value crypto asset, due to “crucial characteristics, including: security, political and architectural centralization, monetary supply, regulation, and liquidity,” he says.

What would it take for Tetras to change its mind and exit its short? “If Vitalik and Vlad came out tomorrow and said, ‘In our sleep we developed the perfect sharding [scaling] solution,’ we might change our view,” Sunnarborg says.

Or if a regulatory ruling gave Ethereum a competitive advantage—for example, if other platforms like NEO or Dfinity were classified as securities—he would rethink the position. He doesn’t see the SEC’s recent statement that Ethereum isn’t a security as an indicator of a competitive advantage, because the ICOs that launched on top of Ethereum are still at risk of being deemed securities.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2018/07/25/why-major-cryptocurrency-investors-are-betting-heavily-against-ethereum/

....

Some interesting analysis and breakdowns on ethereum's platform. The majority of ethereum content posted on this forum is pro eth. There isn't much said on eth from the opposite perspective and so I hope people will not mind me sharing this. I tried to bold most of the relevent points but tbh the whole thing could be worth reading for anyone interested in these topics.

It looks as if the majority of investors are shorting ethereum under the expectation that it is overvalued and overpriced. They could majority wise expect the price to decrease. Over the short term that could be the trend we'll see, especially if a majority of larger institutional investors have formed a consensus on this.

Note how the quoted portions attempt to support their stance with facts and analysis. I think this attempt @ a rational overview is what was missing from the "bitcoin is a bubble" and "bitcoin is a tool for criminal and money launderers" hysteria which pervaded the media awhile ago. Could be something to consider in the days to come when media stories are aired without much if any attempt at verification.

I’m not really understanding this, does it mean that the price might go down at anytime or what? 🤔 I might have to be monitoring the price of Ethereum seriously these days. If the price shows any signs of depreciation while other cryptocurrencies are rising then I might withdraw my money and put it into another crypto, maybe Bitcoin or BCH, cause I can’t afford to lose anything this time around.

[Magiklair]

I can't agree with the negative opinions about ether as it is a great coin and I find it really powerful as it goes after btc. It must be the one that is also wanted by many people. I think that i will trade it

[Dudeperfect]

Each and every coin has its own philosophy, Bitcoin came up with the solution of the issue regarding the high cost and time of the transaction. Similarly, ethereum was introduced to solve the issue of internet-based agreements. When it comes to the global fund transfer, Bitcoin has no other alternative as of now considering transaction fee, security & time frame. However, ETH gives something extra that a normal fund transfer process won't require. I believe that ETH has a scope for growth in the automation industry and that might be the reason why investors are betting on ethereum.

[actuallytwolamas]

When I see "analysis" like this all over the internet that could mean only one thing, it's time to fill the bags of ETH.

[pobeditelvezde]

Unfortunately, ETH is under a pressure in the current moment of time because even despite of the little growth in bitcoin ETH did not grow at all. I observe ETH chart daily because I am holding ETH and, of course, I also have noticed that something is going wrong because in my opinion ETH should cost around 700-800 right now.
Some time ago I was sure that the spread between BTC and ETH would be decreased but several last days got me confused because ETH went down insted of showing a short upward trend like BTC.
Today ETH is around 400$ and I am sure that it is an important level so I am tracking the behavior of ETH near this level. I hope that ETH will hold this level but if not then I will sell my ETH not to stay versus the market trend.

[nidacoinlove]

I can't agree with the negative opinions about ether as it is a great coin and I find it really powerful as it goes after btc. It must be the one that is also wanted by many people. I think that i will trade it

Well ethereum is a very progressive currency and saying it only a cryptocurrency will be injustice with it, it is actually a bit more than it. It is truly a well established platform with facilitating it's consumers with smart contracts as well. Now in such situation we know it don't have anything negative in it but we also know that we have people around with negative minds who will try to drag every coin negatively to accomplish their own greed targets. So it can't be free from any controversy.