SEC Approval Soon? Coinbase Releases Significant Signal! Ether Surges Nearly $200

Ether soared from an overnight low of $2,933 to a peak of $3,126, outperforming its bigger brother Bitcoin. Analysts from Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., stated that the SEC might soon approve an Ether spot ETF.

Ether rebounded quickly on Friday, climbing 5% as its co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to recent criticisms from the crypto community. Coinbase analysts expressed confidence that the Ether spot ETF will soon debut in the market.

Coinbase analysts indicated that despite the SEC’s silence towards issuers, the Ether spot ETF is still expected to make its first market appearance.

David Han, a Coinbase analyst, noted, "As cryptocurrencies begin to become an election issue, we are uncertain whether the SEC is willing to expend the necessary political capital to support a denial."

He added that if the first deadline on May 23 is rejected by the SEC, “litigation is likely to overturn this decision.”

Meanwhile, Ether's price growth has been slow compared to Bitcoin and Solana, leading many members of the crypto community on Twitter to criticize Ethereum's core developers.

Following the Justice Department's arrest of two brothers, many criticized Ethereum for “embracing MEV” due to the exploitation of MEV-related vulnerabilities on the largest smart contract blockchain. Others complained that Ethereum needed to provide more information about the protocol and its updates.

MEV, which stands for Miner Extractable Value, refers to any automated interaction on the blockchain with positive expected value. It is not speculative asset pricing, nor a Ponzi-scheme-like liquidity mining protocol or any traditional investment strategy.

Twitter user Chainyoda commented, “Ethereum has a very bad case of Cosmos infection. Last cycle, Ethereum was discussing human-usable applications like Uniswap and Aave. This cycle, all Ethereum developers and investors are talking about is sequencer-based, shared sequencers, inter-chain rollups.”

More importantly, Geth core developer Peter Szilagyi expressed dissatisfaction with the multiple upgrades the Ethereum network has undergone in a short period. "My criticism is that Ethereum developers have abandoned due process and rushed to fix problems."

This growing concern has triggered a series of posts from Ethereum core contributors, including Josh Stark, Tim Beiko, Dankrad Feist, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Buterin responded in detail to these criticisms in a blog post, acknowledging that the concerns raised by community members are legitimate and “have been addressed by ongoing protocol features.”

He also mentioned that some other community concerns can be “addressed with very realistic adjustments to the current roadmap.” Buterin addressed three main areas he believes constitute most of the issues: MEV and builder dependency, liquid staking, and node hardware requirements.

He discussed how Verkle trees, EIP-4444, robust solo staking, and peer pressure development processes for reducing MEV are addressing these problems.

“There is an almost infinite number of blockchain projects targeting the niche of ‘we can be super-fast, we’ll consider decentralization later.’ I think Ethereum should not be one of those projects,” Buterin said.

He added, “We should deeply respect the unique characteristics that make Ethereum what it is and continue to work to maintain and improve these as Ethereum scales.”