While Bitcoin briefly dabbled with $19k on Saturday, it found resistance there and has retreated a couple of percent to the mid-$18k range. Ethereum on the other hand has kept the momentum running and has powered to its highest price since June 2018.

The green candles for Ethereum just keep coming as it surged from just over $500 on Saturday morning to top out at $585 by Monday morning.

Over the past seven days, Ethereum has cranked 26% from around $460 this time last Monday. Since the beginning of the year, ETH has surged 350% outperforming its big brother Bitcoin which has only made around 150% by comparison.

Next Target For Ethereum: $620

Traders and analysts, such as the popular Josh Rager, are eyeing the next level of resistance which appears on the long-term weekly chart at closes around the $620 level.

$ETH

At resistance on higher time frames – a real challenge is to break and hold above $570

The next target from there on daily/weekly would be $618

Ethereum would have to sustain some crazy momentum to hit that without a pullback first

Holding spot positions here pic.twitter.com/dL8RCKShIx

— Josh Rager (@Josh_Rager) November 22, 2020

Fellow trader ‘IncomeSharks’ thinks the rally could be running out of steam and heading for a pullback.

“4h chart looking like decision time. This is looking like a bearish div on the OBV, but if this breaks then that invalidates a pretty important close that I’m watching.”

The immediate pullback area is $560 but further downsides could see the asset dip to $520 with a lot more support at $510.

Staking Over Half Way There

Much of this momentum is coming from the build-up to the launch of ETH 2.0, proof-of-stake consensus mechanism with Beacon Chain. Early staking has not been that fruitful, but a recent surge has taken the amount staked so far to 55% of the target according to the ETH 2.0 Launchpad.

This milestone means that there are now 291,352 ETH, worth roughly $187 million at today’s prices, already staked with 231,936 to go.

Spartan Group partner Kelvin ‘Spartan Black’ Koh has observed that the price of ETH could well climb higher the closer to that 100% the staking total gets.

The closer we get to 100% of 524K threshold, the higher the price of $ETH… pic.twitter.com/NO3uCVLoJU

— SpartanBlack (@SpartanBlack_1) November 23, 2020

Currently things are not looking likely to meet the proposed date of December 1 since the total needs to be in place a week before genesis, which is November 24.

If it comes before the end of the month, then a mid-December launch may be possible which is likely to result in a very happy holiday period for Ethereum holders.

The YFL governance token for the highly anticipated Linkswap automated market maker has doubled in price in less than a week as the big launch nears.

The Linkswap automated market maker DeFi platform has not even launched yet and already its governance token YFL has doubled in price since the same time last week.

On initial glance, it appears that this one is chasing the monumental gains that Yearn Finance’s YFI token made as DeFi governance tokens remain popular despite large corrections for many of them.

The YF Link token surged over 27% since Sunday to top out just over $1,000 for the first time since it spiked over $1,600 in September. Traders think this is just the beginning and prices could go a lot further:

So you think $YFL at $1000 is big, then you have not seen at $2000, we are at start of a parabola here. and once it breaks $2k, real fun starts. https://t.co/X589rIhMA8 pic.twitter.com/lQ8iPgHxuV

— Fonship is a joke (@fonship) November 22, 2020

Popular twitter analyst Josh Rager has also been plugging YFL and a number of related tokens recently, stating;

“Don’t forget #LINKSWAP launches in 4 days. And Gameswap launches in the coming month with a limited supply. I will be staking $GSWAP, $LINK and $YFL on Linkswap. The first people who stake early in the coming weeks will earn the most rewards, remember that,”

So What is Linkswap?

Linkswap is a DeFi automated market maker for the Chainlink community designed to rival Uniswap. The team envisioned a product targeted to ‘Link Marines’ which are somewhat fanatical about the token and project.

The AMM goes live on November 25 and brings with it a range of liquidity farms for various tokens that have yet to gain traction elsewhere. There will be big incentives for LINK holders and big rewards in YFL which is currently driving market momentum.

The latest announcement from the yet to launch project is a partnership and collaboration with UniLayer, a next-generation trading infrastructure that focuses on the implementation of limit orders for AMMs.

Happy to be collaborating with another up and coming project in the space, $LAYER!

This will enable limit orders on LINKSWAP!$YFLhttps://t.co/PPlSAQQnes

— YFLINK (@YFLinkio) November 22, 2020

LAYER is one of the tokens among several that are supported by Linkswap, and most of them are surging at the moment as the hype builds.

LINK Still Strong

Naturally, Chainlink’s native LINK token will also benefit from Linkswap as it will be the primary pair for many of the yield farms offered.

LINK prices are currently approaching $15 after gaining around 7% over the weekend. The token is up around 23% since the same time last week and is approaching its all-time high of a little over $19 which occurred in mid-August.

Chainlink is currently fifth in the market cap charts, just ahead of Litecoin which has also rallied strongly, with $5.8 billion.