Ethereum Price Unmoved by ‘Missing Link to Mass Adoption’

It’s been almost a week since an important Ethereum (ETH) scalability solution was announced, but the market is still unimpressed by the “missing link to mass adoption of Ethereum.”

On December 5, Matter Labs, a developer of scaling and privacy engine for Ethereum, announced this “link” by introducing their vision for the ZK Sync solution and launching its developer network.

At full throttle, ZK Sync, if enforced, Ethereum would process over 3,000 transactions per second (TPS) without sacrificing privacy and security while remaining decentralized.

This would be a huge improvement since at present, Ethereum can process 15 TPS at peaks. Compared, Visa processes 2,000 TPS, while Bitcoin (BTC) does 7 TPS.

However, developers did not provide any estimates when this solution might be implemented, only saying that “the v0.1 devnet is the first step on the long journey” and “it will take a lot of research, experimentation and development effort.”

It seems that the market has decided to wait for the end of this journey – since December 5, ETH has been trading sideways, mostly moving together with the rest of the market.

At pixel time (18:05 UTC), ETH trades at c. USD 146 and is down by almost 2% in a day and a week, increasing its monthly losses to more than 23%.

ETH price chart:

However, on the bigger picture, bulls are in command as performance over the past year has been more impressive. After plunging to sub USD 100 levels at the depth of last year’s crypto winter, ETH is up 59% in a year, despite the price dropped by almost 60% since June, when it surpassed USD 330.

Traders were hoping for ETH prices to snap back to 2017’s bull trend given the optimism of Ethereum’s developers and implementations of the Constantinople and Istanbul upgrades, on the way to Ethereum 2.0, which should make the network faster, particularly addressing the scaling and mining issues.