Can Ethereum Reach $3,000 by the End of 2018?
Yes - for sure. It is very possible. In fact, this seems to be the most realistic scenario - this figure is a good prediction to start with.
Currently, the Ethereum token’s price is $746 - the coin has demonstrated a rapid growth during the last few weeks given the general positive trend dominating the whole cryptocurrency market.
Ether started this year at around $8….I mean 8 US dollars, can you believe that? That’s a 9200% return. For comparison, Bitcoin has generated a 1900% return at one point this year, and people were very impressed. For Ethereum, the return is astronomical.
However, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Ethereum will gain over 5000% or even over 1000% by the end of 2018. If we look at the current rate, we can see that Ethereum may double its price every few months. This is what has happened since June when Ethereum came back from a sudden crash in which it lost 99.99% of its price for a few seconds. That event actually hit Ethereum’s reputation and credibility, which stopped the sharp growth that was happening at that time.
"Ethereum briefly crashed from $319 to 10 cents in seconds on one exchange after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade"
So, if Ethereum would double its price every few months, which is happening right now, it can easily hit $3,000 by the end of the next year. It also depends on the general mood of the cryptocurrency market. If the whole crypto market grows, then Ethereum will reach that target for sure. However, if the governments and central banks will show opposition, the price might go down.
Anyway, to give you a short answer - yes, Ethereum can do that for sure.
ETH is a foundation building token for smart contract applications. It will be around for a very long time...
Still a bullish claim to make. I have a large stake in Ethereum, and absolutely love the tech behind it and would not object to see such a large growth, but I feel as though this sort of speculative thinking doesn't do much for the actual value of the coin/token. Take a look at BTC and how bullish people were on it, claiming 20k by the end of the year, and yet it's sitting around 15k. The tech is antiquated, and the core developers are still trying to address issues with the congestion. Same with ethereum, and it's scalability issue. The growth of alts (like EOS, NEO, ADA, XLM,etc...) give us a glimpse of what lies in store for us in the future.
I don't know what to make of any claim being outlandish anymore.. 3k Ethereum isn't even the highest I've heard and some people that you talk to have no idea why. That being said, I do like Vitalik Buterin's mind and the increased funding toward solving Ethereum's scalability issues. It seems like once a week there is positive news coming out of the Ethereum camp. I think that moving through 2018 it will be important for Ethereum developers to continue to solve problems and push out dApps for users to use. The more dApps that are useful, user-friendly, and efficient the more Ethereum's market share will grow.
The alts that you mentioned are interesting to watch as well and I'm in no way putting them down by focusing on Ethereum; I honestly don't know much about the ones i've listed.