Crypto market is in the green with Bitcoin (BTC) going to $5,152 and Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) yet again ruling the market with 7 and 10 percent gains respectively while Ethereum seeing the gains of just over 2 percent.

At the time of writing, Ethereum has been trading at $168, as per Coinmarketcap. The YTD gains of ETH are only 25 percent while Bitcoin is close to 40% up since the year beginning.

In mid-December, in tandem with Bitcoin, Ethereum had hit its yearly low at about $184. ETH started this year at about $134. In 2019, till now, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap of $17.7 billion, has seen its highest at $167 on April 3rd.

However, in comparison to other digital assets, Ethereum seems to have lost its fuel as it struggles to take a substantial hike. As economist and trader, Alex Kruger shares, “ETH not moving higher at the moment as strongly as other coins such as LTC or BCH has little to do with fundamentals,” while pointing towards the ETH USD longs that have been constantly on the upside.

Since December last year, the longs have been climbing upwards to 558k peak in March, last month. After that the EH USD longs started going downwards only to reclimb on April 2nd when prices started shooting up.

ETH USD Longs, Source: TradingView

Meanwhile, ETH USD shorts have hit an all-time low, even well below the point that was last hit in August 2018. Since crypto market started turning green, ETH USD shorts have been constantly on the slide as it went from 104k to 65k. Today, it hit its lowest ever at 64.7k

ETH USD Shorts, Source: TradingView

Ethereum Fundamentals

Recently, Bloomberg reported that Ethereum is losing the steam and its co-founder Vitalik Buterin affirmed to their findings. Competition is surely heating up in the industry with projects like Tron and EOS making a lot of advances in terms of a scalable platform, low cost and better throughput.

Even China’s CCID ranked Ethereum on third after EOS and Tron so Ethereum is surely slipping. As we reported earlier, on Google Trends as well, Tron has beaten Ethereum thanks to BitTorrent.

Despite all the competition and criticism Ethereum remains the market leader and of course a pioneer in smart contract platform. Being the first to introduce smart contract capability and further working on serenity with Ethereum 2.0 coming ahead, ETH still holds value but with similar projects cropping up in the market, Ethereum needs to work fast and hard on enhancing its network.