In case you were curious whether to purchase, sell or hang on to it, going by Finder.com’s panel of 50 fintech specialists, Ethereum is predicted to attain an all time high and attain the US$ 5,114 mark by the conclusion of this year. That is approximately a 25% increase from its present price. The panel additionally forecasts that in four years from now, ETH’s price will appreciate to #15,364 and increasing three-fold to $50,788 by the conclusion of 2030. 

Is this the ideal time to purchase? 63% of panelists states it is, while 28% state it’s time to hold and a mere 9% state it’s time to sell. CoinFlip founder and chief advisor Daniel Polotsky, who forecasts ETH will end the year at $4,500, believes Ethereum’s growth might even overtake that of Bitcoin’s. 

“Ethereum does a superior job of supporting development on its blockchain and will have a more lightweight proof of stake mining model in comparison to Bitcoin, which implies that it can prospectively be the foundation of Web 3.0. This causes us to believe that its pace of growth might even overtake that of Bitcoin during the next decade,” he stated. 

Several panelists, which include Origin Protocol co-founder Joshua Fraser, attribute their forecasts to ETH’s wide use case. 

“Ethereum is presently hosting an already big but still swiftly growing alternative financial system in decentralized finance or DeFi. Eventually, Ethereum will be one of the primary financial settlement layers of the world. ETH pricing will be reflective of this future reality,” he stated. 

Some panelists cited ETH’s first mover advantage as the reason underlying their bullish predictions, however Boston Trading CFO Jeremy Britton doesn’t think being the first mover is as advantageous as it appears, particularly with tough competitors in the market. 

“ETH has first-mover advantage, but so did Ford Motors. There are several great projects snapping at ETH’s heels, with increased speed and reduced cost.” 

The panel predicts ETH will lose an average of 30% of its market share to other layer-1 solutions over the upcoming year. 

A good number of panelists cited Solana (SOL) as one of the alternative layer-1’s they’re bullish on, and 1 in 10 (13%) panelists go so far as to state that SOL will ultimately surpass ETH as the main DeFi platform. 

CoreLedger AG CEO Johannes Schweifer is part of the 13% and believes ETH will lose as much as 66% of its market share in the upcoming year. He describes that this is as ETH won’t be able to solve its scalability issues as swiftly as intended: 

“It was not built for increased throughput, and developers are aware that, while other layer-1 solutions like Solana are. The market will grow swiftly with their maturity and they will obtain the lion’s share of all fresh business that is not exclusively on the basis of speculation,” he stated. 

Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik acknowledges that there are other smart-contract platforms that are beneficial in comparison to ETH in a few perspectives, and will therefore take 20% of ETH’s market share – but it will be ways off from bringing an end to ETH. 

“There’s room for alternative smart-contract platforms in the market, making other trade-offs than Ethereum. However, Ethereum’s network effects are particularly robust, making it really difficult to de-throne,” he stated. 

With ETH 2.0 in its preliminary stages, 93% of the panel state the upgrade will solve at least one of ETH’s inherent problems. This implies any edge that other platforms have over ETH might be reduced following the upgrade. 

Restrictions on transaction scalability are the most probable problems to be solved going by the majority (78%) of the panel, followed by sustainability (43%) and poor user experience (17%)