by Lydia Ludmila 
Ethereum (ETH/USD) price retreated on Friday as part of the overall cryptocurrency sell-off. The cryptocurrency declined by more than 7.7% to trade at $2,634. This decline brought its total market capitalisation to more than $304 billion.
ETH price chart
Ethereum retreats
Ether is the second-biggest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. Ethereum’s network helps developers build decentralised applications such as those in the DeFi and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) industries.
Indeed, Ethereum had been used to build most of the biggest DeFi platforms like Aave, Maker, and Uniswap. In total, according to DeFi Pulse, the biggest DeFi platforms have more than $64 billion of total value locked.
Recently, due to Ethereum’s congestion and high gas fees, many developers have started to switch to other competing platforms like Polkadot, Solana, and Binance Chain.
The ETH price retreated today after Elon Musk sent a tweet suggesting that he had fallen out of love with Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that Tesla has invested in. Bitcoin fell by more than 5% after the tweet while the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap fell by 7.67% to more than $1.64 trillion. This provides further evidence that Bitcoin and other altcoins have a close correlation.
Still, some analysts believe that Ethereum’s utility value and the ongoing upgrades to move it to a proof-of-stake concept will help it. They also cite the ongoing increase in transactions as a catalyst that the price will bounce back.
Ethereum price also declined ahead of the latest US non-farm payroll numbers. Data published on Thursday showed that the number of Americans filing for jobless claims declined to below 400k for the first time since the pandemic started. And analysts believe that the unemployment rate will keep falling, Therefore, there is a possibility that the Fed will start turning hawkish, which is a bad thing for Ether and other cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum price prediction
The 4h chart shows that the Ether price jumped to $2,885 on Thursday and then retreated. This is notable since the price approached the previous high at $2,915. As such, the chart clearly shows that the cryptocurrency has formed a double-top pattern whose neckline is at $2,183. It has also crossed the 25-day and 50-day exponential moving averages (EMA).
Therefore, by failing to find buyers above $2,915, it means that the token could keep falling as bears target the neckline at $2,183.
