In the past couple of months, the cryptocurrency ecosystem was overjoyed as Ethereum shot to fame with its market cap crossing the $1 billion mark. The news was hard to ignore, so much so that several digital currency exchanges announced their support for Ether Trading. Bitfinex, CHBTC, Coincheck, Bitso, BitBay and others jumped quickly on the Ethereum bandwagon.

Speaking to CoinTelegraph, Jani Valjavec, the co-Founder at Cashila, explained that the surge in Ethereum market cap was fueled by the high expectations of the people about the projects that can be built on the Ethereum platform, a shift of crypto users from bitcoin to ether, and the fact that Ethereum is approaching the stage of its next release cycle in its development.

“All in all the primarily reason for growth was intrinsic value of Ethereum as a network and platform. And that is something that will maintain growth in future. Imagine this was 100 years ago, and we just found oil, then we are trying to figure out if that has any value. Well, when the first set of engines are produced, it has value”, Valjavec said.

However, ETH seems to have lost the upward momentum. ETH price rose to an all time high of $15.1799 levels in March and since then it has been going downhill and this week ETH/USD fell to a one-month low of $7.0000 levels. It currently trades at $8.5331 levels at the time of writing.

Technical analysis of Ether price suggests that ETH/USD faces resistance at $9 levels, and a break above could push the pair to $9.50 levels and further t0 $10.80 levels. On the flip side, support is seen at $7 levels, and consistent break below this level could see the pair testing $5.50 levels and then $4 levels.

“ETH/USD is slightly bullish in the near term, but unlikely to reach the previous high of $15.1799 levels seen in March”, said FxWirePro.

Accordingly, the market cap now stands at approximately $672 million, at the time of writing. Ethereum still strongly holds the second slot going by market cap, with no competition from other cryptocurrencies in the near future.