Ethereum has Majorly Out-Shined Bitcoin in April, But for How Long?

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April has been relatively favorable to the digital asset industry as the collective cryptos have begun to illustrate a little bit of growth in the charts.

The panic sell-off from 12th-13th March marked the lowest point for the virtual currencies in 2020 but over the past week, major assets have undergone recovery.

According to Coinmetric’s recent State of the Network, Ethereum, the largest altcoin in the industry indicated surges in certain fundamental metrics over the past week. It was observed that the active addresses in ETH blockchain increased by 15 percent from 5th April to 12th April, clocking in total addresses of 742.6k.

The number of transactions and the transfers also incurred minor hikes of 0.6% and 0.7%, up to 276.2k and 665.7k respectively. The total market cap indicated a steady rise for Ethereum as well.

However, after Bitcoin Cash underwent its first halving on 8th April, its hash rate collapsed by 30.1 percent and the mean difficulty of the network plummeted by 22.9 percent as well. However, the report added,

“The BCH halving also led to a significant spike in activity, with active addresses and transfers growing 39.3% and 60.6%, respectively.”

Ethereum registered better returns than Bitcoin

On analyzing the report further, it was revealed that the CMBI and Bletchley Index for cryptos were incurring a positive scenario a third straight week.

With accolades laid in front of it already, Ethereum’s CMBI index outperformed Bitcoin in terms of returns as well. The CMBI ETH index was the strongest performer in the week returns of over 14.5 percent whereas Bitcoin could only muster around 4.9 percent in the charts.

On further analyzing the above chart, it can be identified that mid-cap assets were the best performing asset market group in the past 7 days as the Bletchley Index 20 indicated a 12.4 percent hike. The B20 index was also the sole market-weighted index to outperform Bitcoin in the charts.

Ethereum breaking away from Bitcoin’s dominance

Since the start of April, the collective crypto market hasn’t been subjected to major price volatility. A sustained period of stability over the past 2 weeks has allowed Ethereum to recover as well. After the crash on 13th March, Ethereum became strongly correlated with Bitcoin and BTC continued to dictate its valuation in the charts.

However, with the entire market entering a consolidation phase, Ethereum seems to have slowly sidelined itself from Bitcoin, and currently outperforming the king-coin, as illustrated in the above data.

According to skew analysis, the realized volatility of Ethereum has also decreased when compared with Bitcoin’s volatility in the charts, which suggested that the decoupling between Bitcoin and Ethereum is already set in motion.

Hence, it would be interesting to follow Ethereum’s performance over the next few weeks and witness whether it would have a positive reaction or negative repercussions when Bitcoin undergoes its third halving and facilitates fundamental changes in its own chart.

Utkarsh Gupta: Professional journalist with a proven experience of working in the online media industry. Experienced in Web Content Creation, Editing, Publishing, Journalism, and Creative Writing.