Eth’s Price Above $1,700 Despite Decreased Demand for the Coin

• Demand for ETH drops as macro factors have a negative impact on ETH.
• The whole crypto market looked bearish at the beginning of the week, but pivoted at the middle of the week.
• ETH is trading at $1,724.84 at the time of writing according to CoinMarketCap.

There are continued high expectations for Ethereum (ETH) with the launch of the long-awaited Merge less than two weeks away. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for ETH’s demand that has been severely impacted by macro factors, especially at the beginning of this month. 

The majority of the crypto market, not only ETH, appeared to be heading into a downward trend at the beginning of this week following dampened sentiments. Instead, the market pivoted at the middle of this past week and triggered more upside in the market. ETH also responded with a bullish elevation back above the $1,700 level, albeit briefly.

At the time of writing, the crypto market tracker, CoinMarketCap, shows ETH’s price is at around $1,724.84 after a 0.97 percent increase in price over the last 24 hours. This has added to ETH’s positive weekly performance – pushing its price up by almost 11 percent for the week.

The number of ETH addresses holding more than 1,000 ETH tokens has increased as well. This is evident of whales resuming their accumulation phase. This comes after the number of these addresses reduced earlier this month, signaling increased outflows and supporting the slight price drop at the start of this week.

Data from the crypto analysis firm, Glassnode, shows that the number of ETH call options currently outweigh the put options, which means that the bullish side is more heavily weighted than the bearish side at the moment.

Despite whales resuming their accumulation phase, and ETH’s price pivoting earlier this week toward bullish, the current performance of ETH is underperformance compared to initial expectations. Many investors in the market anticipated a price above $2,000 by now.