Today, there was price spike on both Monero (XMR) and Ethereum (ETH).
Monero for sure, is the result of the announcement that it's going to be listed on BITHUMB exchange.
But why for ETH? Let's see some factors that pushed up the ETH price today.

①Mining Profitability Increase

I'm not a miner, so I don't know about a thing about mining.

But for last few days, there was crazy price hike in BCH and I saw some writings regarding the relationship between the mining difficulty and price.

I thought it is definitely related to mining difficulty(or profitability otherwise) to price change, that's how DASH price went up, and it must have to do with ETH as well.

Graph1) BCH Profitability (24h) : 207% - ASIC mining profitability 1st ranked

Graph2) ETH Profitability (24h) : 100% - GPU mining profitability 1st ranked

I haven't really went deep into the correlationship between mining profitability and the price perfectly.
For what I know, it doesn't have absolute positive correlation.

Let's see the case.

i) Mining difficulty goes up → Miner's profitability goes down → No mining (No interest) → Price goes down

ii) Mining difficulty goes up → Miner's profitability goes down BUT there's LIMITED SUPPLY → Price goes up

In my opinion, mining difficulty can increase as well as decrease the price.
So I think for BCH, DASH, and ETH, the other positive factors played a huge role in price increase last few days.

The other positive factors are below:

②Metropolis hardfork

Ethereum Metropolis Hardfork was one of ETH's 2017 early roadmap.
It was once delayed from June to August, and so did the Difficulty Bomb.

The Improvements and Upcoming Upgrades

ⅰ) Anonymity Improvement – With the new ” Zero-knowledge proofs or zk-SNARKs” costumers and users can make transactions while their anonymity is still kept higher than before.

ⅱ) Developing at Ease – Programming and smart contracts will be made far easier with the new upgrade, relieving some of the pressure on current programmers. Gas will also be adjusted for bill settling.

ⅲ) Masking for Security – Users are allowed to determine the address for which they have a private key. This will increase security on the network, even against quantum computer hacking.

ⅳ) Difficulty Bomb – Making mining exponentially more difficult. designed to be an intermediate step in the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) on the network. It is often called as the ‘Ethereum Ice Age.(Source: ethereum world news)

③ Ethereum's turn

It's my personal opinion, that the third reason is which that pushed hard up the ETH price.
Coin market cap is getting bigger gradually (with big ups and downs), Coin market nowadays show a circulation of limited money from one coin to another

Beside alt coin, the major cryptocurrency among BTC, BCH, and ETH, Ethereum should take the turn.

p.s. In regards to ETH anonimity, ETH is working with Zcash team.
So, I'm adding Zcash graph which also pumped along with ETH.

I for got to give comments on the future price.

It's ETH to the moon :)

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