#Ethereum Price Shorts Reach Record Levels
Beginning on Thursday, crypto markets experienced a massive sell-off which affected most coins and brought down total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies to $200 billion, down $25 billion in the space of a few hours in what was overall a bearish week for cryptocurrencies as a whole, but ethereum in particular.Behaviour of investors indicates that the market expects ethereum to fall even further. At the moment, of all the major cryptocurrencies, ethereum appears to be the worst hit by the selloff, after months of weak performance. At the moment, more than 300,000 short positions have opened for ethereum as investors continue to bet on its price falling even lower.A possible reason for this is the existence of sizeable ICO selloffs. According to this school of thought, following a prolonged period of carnage in a persistent bear market that does not look set to end anytime soon, many ICOs have sold their ETH positions to make up for potential losses that may occur in the future and to fund their continued project development and operations.It will be recalled that at the peak of the crypto market bull run, which coincided with a steep jump in popularity of ethereum-based ICOs, ETH traded at about $1,500. Since then, it has fallen more than 90 percent, causing many investors and ICO treasuries to offload their holdings in order to avoid more losses. Another school of thought has it that the record number of short positions sparked by the general crypto market selloff is down to a decline in global equities.
About Ethereum (ETH): Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.These apps run on a custom built blockchain, an enormously powerful shared global infrastructure that can move value around and represent the ownership of property.This enables developers to create markets, store registries of debts or promises, move funds in accordance with instructions given long in the past (like a will or a futures contract) and many other things that have not been invented yet, all without a middleman or counterparty risk.The project was bootstrapped via an ether presale in August 2014 by fans all around the world. It is developed by the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss non-profit, with contributions from great minds across the globe.
Ethereum (ETH) is the 2nd largest cryptocurrency by market cap size. It is up 1.91% over the past 24 hours and is currently trading at $207.75. It can be bought with fiat dollars, credit cards, or debit cards on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase, CEX.io, and Changelly.
