A few factors and upcoming events may be pointing out that the next big wave of mass audience investors and fresh money may be coming to Ethereum and not Bitcoin. In this article, I will be taking a viewpoint based entirely on perception and speculation value, and not fundamentals.

3 key catalysts that may drive the Ethereum capitalization close to Bitcoin’s

1. Ethereum Futures are expected to be launched soon
With the SEC ruling that Ether is not a security recently, that opened up the door for ETH futures. CBOE and SME are expected to launch it in a couple of months. As we saw, when they did it with Bitcoin, that drove the price of Bitcoin to almost 20 000$. Same dynamics may be expected with Ether prices.

2. Scalability developments - sharding, Plasma, Loom, etc.
A lot of projects are currently working on the Ethereum scalability.

If the launching of futures coincides with some development, announcements, successful testing or implementation of these projects, we may see a very sharp rise in ETH price relative to Bitcoin. And thus, we may see a craze about the unthinkable – Bitcoin losing its prime spot.

3. Going from PoW to PoS
The latest developments in integrating Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum are pretty interesting. As Vitalik Buterin mentioned, the required amount of ETH to stake in order to become a validator may be as low as 32 ETH. This is around 15 000$ with current ETH prices of less than 500$. This is a pretty low threshold.

My observations tend me to show that although pretty much everybody nowadays have heard of Bitcoin and mining, most of the unsophisticated people have no idea what mining really is. Most of them give up when they hear GPUs, antminers, mining pools and condemn the topic as something too difficult for a non-tech savvy person to understand.

Staking is a much easier concept, though. For an outsider it sounds as easy as putting money in a bank account on a deposit and collecting an interest rate.

So the complexity of mining and the hardware needed for it stopped all the newcomers from entering the mining. Staking is so much easier to comprehend. You just need a wallet address and a simple software. So I suppose a lot more mainstream people will be lured into involving with Ethereum by buying and staking than they did with Bitcoin mining.

The flippening?

If Ethereum and Bitcoin come close in market capitalization, we will probably see the most exciting news and mass media hype about the possible dethroning of the king. For reference, you probably remember how much the price of Bitcoin Cash pumped in December when that possibility was not that far away. This may lead the masses coming into Ethereum and drive the prices further up. A few things that will ease the process:

1)FOMO in people that missed the Bitcoin run
All the people that didn’t join the bandwagon in 2017, have now the perception that they missed the opportunity with Bitcoin. In reality, they missed the ETH run, too, but it is a matter of perception. What do you think will happen when the news come that Ethereum has now overtaken Bitcoin and is the new cool kid in the block? All these people that were on the verge of entering the first time, probably won’t hesitate too much this time. Again, they will be buying too late, when the news are on the TV and the market has topped.

2)Speculators pumping the price of ETH
Of course, we will see small scale and large scale speculators starting hyping the value, potential and supremacy of Ethereum as the new king of crypto. The goal is clear – to further amplify the perception that it is an opportunity not to be missed.

3)No bottleneck on the entry through Bitcoin
Back in the summer of 2017, the entry points to the crypto economy were very few. And most of them were through buying Bitcoin. That was keeping its price high. Today, the fiat entries are much more and you can directly buy Ethereum on almost every single exchange that offers fiat-crypto pairs.

Conclusion

Bitcoin was already used once by speculators to lure dumb money in the market, when it was obviously overbought. It is exhausted for that purpose. The masses are already familiarized with Bitcoin. Grandmas included. All the grannies who wanted in are already in. It is time for something different to be presented and sold to the unsophisticated investors. Something easier to understand. Will this be Ethereum and staking? It may very well be.

If you found at least 0.0000001 BTC worth of value in this post, please upvote, re-steem or leave your comments below. If not, feel free to argue with me or insult me in the comments.

Either way, thank you for your time!

More from me: https://angeloncrypto.com/

Disclaimer: The information in this article is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or instruction. You take your own risks when buying or selling cryptocurrencies and tokens. Consult your financial adviser first.