Here is ETH’s quarter-end price average on high-volume cryptocurrency exchanges for the previous five quarters rolling. Q4 turned out to be an ideal window for swing traders to realize profits on Ether:
’25 Q1 End $1,824 (-45%)
’24 Q4 End $3,332 (+28%)
’24 Q3 End $2,603 (-24%)
’24 Q2 End $3,433 (-2%)
’24 Q1 End $3,508 (+59%)
That’s according to historical Ethereum price data compiled by Yahoo Finance.
Tough Times for Long-Term Ether Holders
Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum smart money platform, has traded in a market doldrums since rolling far downhill from its $4,860 all-time high price in Nov. 2021.
Over that time period, its largest competitor, Bitcoin (BTC), has risen by greater percentages despite a heftier market cap and locked in its gains at higher long-term support levels.
Ethereum didn’t rally as far as Bitcoin in 2024, nor did it hold as much of its market cap as crypto markets sharply corrected this February.
Quinn Thompson, Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Lekker Capital, a Hague, Netherlands-based small hedge fund that launched last year, said at the end of March:
Make no mistake, $ETH as an investment is completely dead… There is no investment case here. As a network with utility? Yes. As an investment? Absolutely not.”
Ethereum has some significant headwinds and difficulties creating price resistance, but other financial analysts expect it to recover and continue its long-term high growth trend.
Standard Chartered Ether Price Forecast: $10K
Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s crypto research head, predicted in October that Ether prices would rise to $10,000 in President Donald Trump’s second term.
The UK multinational bank had $367 billion in assets under management in 2024. Kendrick hit a bullseye with his prediction last February that Ether’s price would climb to $4,000 by year end.
Meanwhile, in March, a report in Forbes Digital Assets noted that an increase in ETH long positions taken by futures market traders in Q1 signals a rally starting soon. The report said:
“Though the price of Ethereum could fall further, the futures data indicates that institutional traders believe it could soon trade as high as $2400 – a 22% increase over today’s price.”
Since 2023, this market has been a reliable leading indicator for rallies and routs in Ether’s price. Together, these two analyses forecast near-term and long-term gains for Ether purchased in Q2 of 2025. But here are five hurdles Ethereum will have to overcome along the way:
1. L2 Ethereum Gas Wars
Ethereum underwent a systemwide reboot from processor mining to currency staking to pay transaction validators in Sept. 2022. The currency community called this historic operation “The Merge.”
Changing from proof-of-work (mining) to proof-of-stake validation promised more network bandwidth, faster settlement, and lower fees to use Ethereum. The redesign failed to impress users or markets sufficiently.
As a result, Ethereum deployed a new incentive structure with the Dencun upgrade on Mar. 13, 2024.
This configuration introduced a new, far cheaper method for second-layer (L2) blockchains to lock their updates into the Ethereum base chain (L1). A year later, that leaves the Ethereum network in its “ELthereum” era.
A whole slew of new Layer-2 chains now handle much of the network’s business for lower fees and then periodically lock in a small hash of all their latest blocks with the base chain.
The base chain’s revenues from fees consequently dropped from $30 million annually one year ago to just $500,000 in Q1 of 2025. That has left some irritated Ethereum stakers high and dry. Most Ethereum L2s use their own native currencies.
The largest by market cap in Q2 2025 are (in descending order by size): Mantle (MNT), POL (POL), Arbitrum (ARB), Optimism (OP), Movement (MOVE), and Starknet (STRK).
Their average market capitalization was $1.49 billion to end Q1.
2. More Trump Coattail for Solana
President Donald Trump has become a singular influence on the crypto sector, with an agenda of unprecedented and unequivocal support for cryptocurrency from the US government.
The president and the Trump family’s crypto business warmly support both Ethereum and Solana but have shown some favoritism toward the latter in their business ventures.
The new Trump stablecoin launched in March, USD1, is an Ethereum and Binance token. Meanwhile, in February, the president’s son, Eric Trump, pumped Ether in a post on X.
But Solana hosts the Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin, which ranked #4 by total market capitalization among all meme coins at the beginning of April. Its market cap topped $2 billion.
Imagine if the president and his family supported Blu-ray or HD DVD during that format war.
Meanwhile, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has been beefing with Trump, while the founder of competitor coin Cardano (ADA), Charles Hoskinson, is making inroads with the new White House administration.
Last July, Buterin told followers he is against “choosing your political allegiances based on who is ‘pro-crypto.’” The note was widely read as a snub to President Trump’s campaign.
However, this could work in Ethereum’s favor among the Internet’s decentralization purists.
3. Solana Memes Clobbering Ethereum
It’s not just the Trumps that favor Solana’s lightweight, low-fee network to deploy meme coins. One analyst recently said the Solana meme frenzy is a headwind for Ethereum.
Hong Kong-based institutional crypto manager ($1 billion+ AUM) HashKey Capital’s Jeffrey Hu said in March:
“Ethereum is also not doing well in terms of community culture. In contrast, Solana clearly places more emphasis on meme coin community culture, which has attracted more application development and on-chain transactions.”
Ethereum has had some massive successes, such as Pepe (PEPE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB), but the overall capitalization and daily trading volume for Solana memes markedly eclipses Ethereum.
4. Wall St. ETFs Favor BTC over ETH
Meanwhile, Wall Street’s ETF investors clearly favored BTC in Q1 2025, but before that as well.
As Bitcoin ETFs flows flipped green on Mar. 17 for nine consecutive trading days, Ether ETFs remained bearish with net outflows on each day over that period.
On the 1-month window, Wall Street investors sold $760 million worth of Ether ETFs. During that same time, big Internet traders with whale-sized addresses holding 10,000 ETH or more declined from 999 to 919.
Wall Street’s selling pressure put resistance on Ethereum price gains in March.
5. Bitcoin Maxis Flex Social Clout
During this Bitcoin bull run, there have not been any Ethereum boosters with the profile and charisma of the Bitcoin maxis like Michael Saylor and Robert Kiyosaki.
Saylor’s BTC treasury company Strategy announced another monster Bitcoin purchase on Mar. 31 of 22,048 BTC for around $1.9 billion.
There is no comparable figure from corporate America with that kind of conviction and endless appetite for Ether yet. Meanwhile, bestselling investing author Robert Kiyosaki regularly pumps BTC to his X audience of 2.7 million followers.
The most similar thing the Ethereum camp has at the moment is maybe Mark Cuban. He calls himself an Ethereum maximalist. But he’s a big Bitcoin bull too, and he hasn’t been as bombastic in supporting ETH as the Bitcoin maxis have been for BTC.
Ethereum prices rounded the first quarter of 2025 down by half: -45% from $3,330 on Dec. 31 to $1,824 on Mar. 31. A massive UK bank expects the altcoin to reach $10,000 by 2029. Crypto News, ETHBTC, ETHUSD, featured1, Ethereum, Ethereum (ETH) Price
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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