Let's begin by taking a look at Ethereum, as anticipation for Ethereum 2.0 seems to be drawing some buyers in to the #2 cryptocurrency, which now has gains of over 80% in the past month!
Ethereum was about $85 this time 30 days ago, at the time of publishing it's sitting at $156 with a healthy 2% gain today as well.
But the star of the show everyone's watching is Bitcoin - and it's good news there too!
Bitcoin is back above $4000, but just barely. Leaving us with the big question of 'will it hold?' and i'm not insane enough to try to answer that.
What I can say is there's no reason for it not to hold or keep going up, since one huge plus deserving of a price gain is Bitcoin's dropping transaction fees - which makes the currency more usable as... well, a currency.
At time of publishing, faster next block transactions will cost you about 4 cents, and if you're willing to wait an hour or so, as low as 2 cents.
For perspective - the last time we saw fees this low it was 2015.
Then reason behind the transaction fee drop is an important piece of good news as well - the Lightning Network has helped lower network congestion, with 5,150 nodes in operation today.
So far so good for 2019!
Author: Justin Derbek
New York News Desk
