Brandt’s bearish ETH call — But community predicts $3K before Merge

Veteran futures trader Peter Brandt has suggested that the price of Ether (ETH) could drop to as low as $1,268 in the coming month, but the consensus view of 15,500 members of the CoinMarketCap community is that the price will have hit roughly $3,131 by June 30.

The Ethereum network is now in the final steps of its long-awaited Merge with the Beacon Chain and transition to proof-of-stake (PoS), with developers confirming on Wednesday that they successfully completed the Ropsten testnet merge.

The Ropsten testnet has now been merged!What a historic and thrilling day for the Ethereum community and what a thrilling day forNext up, 2 more public testnet merges and then mainnetThe Merge is coming

— sassal.eth (@sassal0x) June 8, 2022

While the timeframe has often been subject to delays, the Merge is slated to go live in August if all goes to plan. The switch to PoS will massively decrease the energy consumption of the Ethereum network while also improving its security.

The price of ETH has barely responded to the latest encouraging developments, however, and is down 1.7% over the past 24 hours to sit at $1,788 at the time of writing.

Brandt has been trading since 1975 and has gained the attention of the crypto community in the past by predicting some of Bitcoin’s (BTC) historical heights and crashes.

If the bearish scenario he outlined for ETH comes true, it would mark a further 29% drop this month.

On Tuesday, Brandt highlighted a month-to-month chart from April to June to his 648,000 Twitter followers and noted that the rest of June could be rough for Ether if the market sentiment doesn’t turn significantly:

“Classical charting 101. This is a POSSIBLE descending triangle. A downside completion, unless immediately nullified, would not be constructive.”

Classical charting 101This is a POSSIBLE descending triangle. A downside completion, unless immediately nullified, would not be constructive$ETHUSD pic.twitter.com/33kOZK4tjF

— Peter Brandt (@PeterLBrandt) June 7, 2022

Trader Crypto Tony also highlighted a similar scenario to his 201,000 Twitter followers, questioning whether a descending triangle on the ETH chart was “too obvious” to ignore. Crypto Tony’s bearish estimates were slightly higher, however, at the $1,450–$1,600 range.

But the community on CoinMarketCap seems bullish — or at least high on hopium — about the near future of ETH, with 15,466 voters accounting for an average price estimate of $3,131.75 by June 30. The climb to the level would mark a mammoth increase of 75.37%.

CoinMarketCap enables the community to vote on predicted price targets via a tab under its listed asset pages. Apart from this prediction, around 8,500 people have estimated ETH will have hit $2,981.27 by July 31, or a 66.94% increase, shortly before the Merge.

In general, the community on CoinMarketCap that votes on ETH price predictions has had varying levels of success since December.

Related: Price analysis 6/8: BTC, ETH, BNB, ADA, XRP, SOL, DOGE, DOT, AVAX, SHIB

They predicted ETH’s closing price of 2021 with 88.40% accuracy, meaning they were 11.6% off the actual price of $3,682.63 with their estimation of $4,109.65.

They then predicted the bearish drop of January with 54% accuracy, February at 76.17% accuracy, March at 89.91%, and April at 62.41%. However, they fell off massively in May with 16.97% accuracy, although that was an unprecedented month, in which Do Kwon’s Terra ecosystem caused a multi-billion-dollar market crash.