The Wall Street behemoth JPMorgan (JPM) stated that it is cautious about the cryptocurrency markets through 2024, but that it expects an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain that will increase its scalability to propel ether (ETH) above bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies.
According to a recent report, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision on whether to approve spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is not expected to result in significant gains. When the SEC approves spot bitcoin ETFs early in the new year, analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou predicted a “high chance of buy-the-rumor/sell-the-fact effect.”
According to JPMorgan, the 2024 bitcoin halving event is “largely priced in,” and “excessive optimism by crypto investors arising from an impending approval of spot bitcoin ETFs by the SEC has shifted bitcoin to the overbought levels seen during 2021.”
Because of the proto-danksharding, or EIP-4844 upgrade, ether is probably going to shine. That is a byproduct of Danksharding, which uses the shards to increase space for groups of data, which is a variation of sharding, which divides the network into shards to speed up transactions. The “blob-carrying transaction” is a new transaction type that is added to Ethereum via proto-danksharding.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, venture capital (VC) funding showed some “reinvigoration,” according to the bank, but it seems “rather tentative.”
Even though decentralised finance (DeFi) activity has improved somewhat, the report stated that the “biggest disappointment continues to be the inability of DeFi to encroach into the traditional financial system, which is necessary for the crypto ecosystem to transition from crypto native to real world applications.”