Crypto analyst who called ethereum’s climb to $3,400 reiterates a $10,000 call – Yahoo Finance

Despite pulling back a bit from its all-time high earlier this year, ethereum (ETH-USD) still has a shot to hit $10,000 by year's end, according to one analyst who has been right so far this year.

Magnetic Managing Director Megan Kaspar, who called ether's tripling to top $3,000 back when it was still closer to $1,000 in January, told Yahoo Finance Friday that the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap could still hit her $8,000 to $10,000 price target in 2021.

"Investors are still using crypto as a favorite tool to hedge against inflation," she said, adding that two new upgrades are likely to catapult the ethereum network when completed. Those proposals will initiate the "burn" or elimination of the fractions of ether that had previously been paid to miners in transactions.

"Towards the end of the year, beginning of next year, we'll have about a million worth of ethereum coming out of supply. So that will initiate it becoming a deflationary asset," Kaspar said.

At the same time, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, transacting on the ethereum network have been attracting a lot more attention lately. This week, the cartoon image of a rock, offered through the EtherRock NFT collection, was sold for more than $1.7 million. Overall, monthly NFT sales hit a record high near $900 million during August, according to industry tracker NonFungible.

That spike in attention is continuing to bring people into ethereum, since many of the NFT sales on sites like OpenSea and others price NFT auctions in ether.

"I think we'll continue to see this as the younger generation feels comfortable buying and owning assets that are not physical, and that, again, is sort of the tech trend that we're moving towards in dematerialization," Kaspar said.

Zack Guzman is an anchor for Yahoo Finance Live as well as a senior writer covering crypto, cannabis, startups, and breaking news at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.

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Crypto analyst who called ethereum's climb to $3,400 reiterates a $10,000 call - Yahoo Finance