Whenever the cryptocurrency market enters its crazy volatility mode, there's a tendency to push perceptions and thoughts beyond reasonable. Emotion replaces reason.
A few weeks ago, when Ethereum's price was rising day by day, most Internet comments said Bitcoin was threaten by scalability problems and Ethereum was going to replace it. Now, the same people that made those statements argue that Ethereum’s bubble popped and there's no way to maintain its price once investors start running from Altcoins back to Bitcoin and Fiat money.
In my opinion, both analysis are wrong and volatility is in the nature of any establishing market. However, great and practical changes happened this semester: Ethereum's smart contract platform has become the biggest crowdfunding platform in the planet. Decentralized, blockchain based, full of scalability and user-friendly limitations, it has managed to engage dozens of thousands of investors in countless projects of the most broad scopes (yes, many of them are jokes described as business plans).
This movement has proven a practical utility for Ethereum's network. Only this already justifies its current value. It makes this platform similar to an Investment Bank, with some sharp edges, but totally decentralized and really promising. Ether tokens are finding a noble way to finance countless new applications to the Blockchain, even though outside Ethereum's network.
However, this should not hide problems and improvement opportunities. It seems to me that creating a more organized, but still decentralized, discussion panel about each ICO to help investors' decision making process in whether to support or report new ICOs is fundamental to avoid that this becomes a scam launching platform. On the other hand, I propose to Ethereum's developers to make available more friendly smart contract templates to crowdfunding, especially on interface's clarity to increase audience outside the NERD environment. I'm sure not only a few investors have sent tokens to wrong addresses, were deceived by phishing, or simply just got confused when sending tokens.
To sum up, I see Ethereum has taken up a market before dominated by companies like Kickstarter and Investment banks, showing potential to this blockchain. Only this should give support to Ether price in a much higher level than last year's. On the other hand, it is clear that it doesn't have enough scalability to become the "Global Computer" aspired by its founders, and that its leaders should be more transparent on how they plan to tackle this issue. Where is the Proof-of-Stake code Github? Where do discussions about Casper happen? How do they plan to persuade miners not to do another hard fork?
About price, my commentary is that it should settle around 150 and 200. It will be conditioned on that new ICOs can draw enough resources to cover the natural selling movement that launched ICO will make to support their business plans.
DISCLAIMER: the author has an investment portfolio on many cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitshares, EOS, Dash, and others. This post is just a reflexion. Get informed and make your own conclusions.