The price of Ether (ETH), the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, could soar to $10,000 or even higher this year despite the asset being overshadowed by Bitcoin (BTC) in the past months. These were the words of Juan Leon, crypto research analyst at asset manager Bitwise.

According to Leon, ETH, worth $3,950 at the time of writing, could rally past its all-time high of $4,800 and possibly surpass $10,000 due to catalysts like the upcoming Dencun upgrade and excitement surrounding the launch of spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The Upcoming Dencun Upgrade

The Dencun upgrade is highly anticipated and expected to enhance Ethereum layer-2 rollup efficiency through proto-danksharding or ephemeral blobs (EIP-4844). It is the network’s biggest upgrade since Shapella in April 2023, which enabled the withdrawal of staked ETH.

Proto-danksharding aims to reduce storage demands by using temporary storage space for higher transactional throughput. This will allow access to off-chain data, reducing the transaction costs on layer-2 networks by 10x or more. Both the Shapella and Dencun upgrades are major steps in Ethereum’s transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network.

Dencun has been successfully deployed on the Goerli, Sepolia, and Holesky testnets, and the mainnet launch is scheduled for March 13.

Leon believes the launch of Dencun on Ethereum will be a positive sentiment catalyst that will push ETH to unprecedented highs. By reducing transaction costs on layer-2 networks, activity and mainstream consumer demand will pick up.

Excitement Around Ethereum ETF Approval

Another catalyst that could cause the price of ETH to skyrocket is excitement around the launch of spot Ethereum ETFs in the U.S.

Several asset management firms, including BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, Galaxy Digital, VanEck, and Ark Invest, all of which issued the new spot Bitcoin ETFs, have submitted proposals to launch similar products for Ethereum. However, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has pushed the deadline for deciding on their applications to May.

The Bitwise analyst thinks the odds of spot Ethereum ETF approval are not as high as they were for Bitcoin ETFs, speculating there is a 50% to 60% chance they may be greenlighted. Regardless, he believes their launch is imminent and may happen sooner or later.