Is ETH Waking Up? Peter Brandt Removes Short Position as ETH/BTC Bounces

Ethereum holders are seeing a glimmer hope today.

ETH jumped by as much as 5% in the past 24 hours, to as high as 2,335, while Bitcoin was flat, according to Coingecko. That caused the ETH/BTC ratio to rebound from the lowest since April 2021.

ETH's rebound caused veteran trader Peter Brandt, who said he shorted ETH one week ago, to eat his words.

"Strong opinions, weakly held," Brandt said today on X. "When circumstances change, my opinion changes. My recent appraisal of $ETH called for immediate price collapse - that has not happened. I have withdrawn my bearish outlook based on chart structure."

Just four days ago Brandt said a technical charting pattern called a rising wedge showed ETH would drop to $1,000, and then to $650, with the caveat that, "classical chart patterns in price charts are not sacred - they fail to perform according to the textbooks all the time."

Of course, now is one of those times.

ETH 2023 Underperformance

ETH is up more than 90% this year, and while that may be a sizable return compared with U.S. stocks, it lags BTC's 165% gain and Solana's surge of more than 600%.

Bitcoin has rallied this year in part thanks to speculation a spot ETF approval es around the corner, while Solana emerged from the ashes of the FTX collapse (Sam Bankman-Fried was a major Solana ecosystem backer).

Other Layer 1 chains have also rallied as risk appetite returns, with traders eager to flip memecoins without paying Ethereum's higher gas fees.

Even so, Ethereum has some of the best fundamentals out there, bringing in the most fee revenue, and boasting the highest total value locked and stablecoin market cap by many times over compared with other major Layer 1s. It also has the highest decentralized exchange volume, though that's being rivaled by Solana.

Also, with a major upgrade coming up next year, traders may now be seeing it's time for the original smart contracts chain to outperform.

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes seems to think so. Last night he tweeted, "fam ... I have a confession to make (...) I dumped $SOL, and [bought] more $ETH."