Ethereum Positive/Negative Sentiment Still At Muted Levels

In a new post on X, analytics firm Santiment has talked about the sentiment around Ethereum that’s present among social media users. The indicator shared by Santiment is the “Positive/Negative Sentiment,” which tells us how the positive and negative comments related to ETH compare against each other on the major social media platforms.

The metric separates between the two types of comments by putting users’ posts/threads/messages through a machine-learning model. Once they have been divided, it counts up the number of each and takes the ratio between them.

Below is the chart shared by the analytics firm that shows the trend in the Ethereum Positive/Negative Sentiment over the last few months:

As displayed in the graph, the Ethereum Positive/Negative Sentiment interestingly witnessed a plunge as the asset’s breakout earlier in the month took place. This would suggest that social media users weren’t convinced by the rally. The continuation in the run since then has meant that the sentiment has improved a bit, but it still remains much lower than the high from last month. Thus, it seems retail is in disbelief, despite the fact that the cryptocurrency is nearing its all-time high (ATH).

If the past is anything to go by, this fact could actually be a positive signal for ETH. “Prices historically movein  the opposite direction of retail traders’ expectations,” says Santiment. The analytics firm has highlighted in the chart some instances of this trend in action. It would appear that FOMO spikes led to price drops for the asset, while excessive FUD resulted in price rises.

“With key stakeholders accumulating loose coins that small ETH traders are willing to part with right now, prices are showing very little sentiment resistance from breaking through and making history in the near future,” explains Santiment.

In some other news, the Ethereum Futures Open Interest has shot up alongside the price surge, as analytics firm Glassnode has pointed out in an X post.

The Futures Open Interest measures, as its name suggests, the total amount of futures-related positions that are currently open on all centralized derivatives exchanges. From the chart, it’s visible that the metric has climbed beyond the $35.5 billion mark, which is a new record.

ETH Price

Following a rally of over 7% in the last 24 hours, Ethereum has reached the $4,730 mark, now sitting within touching distance of the ATH.

Dogecoin could be approaching a structural breakout that carries it to the long-discussed $1 threshold, according to crypto analyst Stephan Burns, who in a July 24 livestream described a “perfect storm” of monetary design, market structure and what he characterizes as rare astrological alignments. Burns framed the move as an “inevitability,” while acknowledging timing uncertainty, arguing that the next parabolic advance could emerge within months.

Is $1 Dogecoin Inevitable?

Burns built his case first on tokenomics. Dogecoin’s fixed issuance of 10,000 DOGE per one-minute block—approximately 5.2 billion DOGE annually—translates today into an inflation rate of roughly 3.3% against a circulating supply he placed at 150 billion. With that supply base, he said, the network simultaneously sustains miner incentives, gradually replaces lost coins and avoids the periodic “supply shocks” embedded in Bitcoin’s quadrennial halving schedule.

“It’s beautiful because of this inflation rate,” he said, calling Dogecoin “better as a currency than Bitcoin” precisely because of its predictability. By contrast, he argued, Bitcoin’s declining issuance—on track to fall below half a percent after the 2028 halving—forces a future reliance on transaction fees. “Eventually Bitcoin will be completely mined… the network has to be maintained by transaction fees. That’s probably not enough to incentivize miners at the end of the day,” Burns claims.

Related Reading

He also asserted that Dogecoin’s governance surface is harder to co-opt than Bitcoin’s as large institutional and governmental actors accumulate BTC exposure. In his view, Dogecoin remains “the people’s currency,” with economic dilution limited by social and technical difficulty of altering code. The flat nominal issuance, he added, produces a declining percentage inflation rate over time without rendering the asset strictly deflationary or, in his words, vulnerable to miner attrition.

Beyond economics, Burns devoted extensive time to what he calls “crypto astrology,” arguing that Dogecoin’s natal chart—anchored to its genesis block—now sits under exceptionally favorable transits. He highlighted Pluto’s conjunction with Dogecoin’s natal Moon, describing it as “a once in a roughly 250-year transit,” and an impending Jupiter return with the planet “exalted” near the project’s midheaven point.

These, he claimed, historically correspond to phases of visibility, capital inflow and wealth symbolism. “Dogecoin is being activated… more than any other cryptocurrency this year,” he said, labeling the configuration a catalyst for renewed global attention.

Burns linked those internal transits to a broader macro cycle, citing the approaching Saturn–Neptune conjunction at the first degrees of Aries in early 2026, which he associated—through earlier historical recurrences—with milestones such as the emergence of coinage and trade networks.

Related Reading

In his view, that backdrop reinforces the plausibility of another speculative wave. A logarithmic review of Dogecoin’s price history, he said, shows three prior “parabolic” expansions separated by lengthening consolidation phases; the current basing structure, including what he described as an ascending W-pattern supported by long-term moving averages, could precede a fourth. “Just based off of that it looks like we may be due for another one of these parabolic moves up in the next few months,” he said, while conceding that “just because I think it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

He further projected that a Dogecoin exchange-traded fund “will get approved” and place the asset “in the spotlight,” though he did not provide documentation beyond his expectation. Burns also contrasted Dogecoin’s relative resilience on its Bitcoin ratio with altcoins that have reverted to prior ranges, arguing that structural holding above pre-2020 levels supports his thesis.

Summarizing his outlook, Burns reiterated what he called the “inevitability of Dogecoin going to $1,” framing that level as the maximal target in his public analysis for the forthcoming cycle. The timing, he implied, hinges on the interplay between tokenomics-driven accumulation and the unfolding of the transits he tracks. “I do think it’s going to moon,” he concluded.

At press time, DOGE traded at $0.23.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

T'was the day before genesis, when all was prepared,
geth was in sync, my beacon node paired.
Firewalls configured, VLANs galore,
hours of preparation meant nothing ignored.

Then all at once everything went awry,
the SSD in my system decided to die.
My configs were gone, chain data was history,
nothing to do but trust in next day delivery.

I found myself designing backups and redundancies.
Complicated systems consumed my fantasies.
Thinking further I came to realise:
worrying about these kinds of failures was quite unwise.

Events

The beacon chain has several mechanisms to incentivise validator behaviour, all of which are dependant on the current status of the network, so it is vital to consider these failure cases in the greater context of how other validators might fail when deciding what are, and what aren’t, worthwhile ways of securing your node(s).

As an active validator, your balance either increases or decreases, it never goes sideways*. Therefore a pretty reasonable way of maximising your profits, is to minimise your downsides. There are 3 ways your balance can be reduced by the beacon chain:

• Penalties are issued when your validator misses one of their duties (e.g. because they are offline)
• Inactivity Leaks are handed out to validators that miss their duties while the network is failing to finalise (i.e. when your validator being offline is highly correlated with other validators being offline)
• Slashings are given to validators who produce blocks or attestations that are contradictory and therefore could be used in an attack

* On average, a validator’s balance may stay the same, but for any given duty, they are either rewarded or punished.

Correlation

The effect of a single validator being offline or performing slashable behaviour is small in terms of the overall health of the beacon chain. It is therefore not punished heavily. In contrast, if many validators are offline, the balance of offline validators can decrease much more rapidly.

Similarly, if many validators perform slashable actions at the same time, from the beacon chain’s perspective, this is indistinguishable from an attack. It is therefore treated as such, and 100% of the offending validators’ stake is burned.

Because of these “anti-correlation” incentives, validators should worry more about failures that might affect others at the same time rather than isolated, individual issues.

Causes and their probability.

So let’s think through some failure cases and examine them through the lens of how many others would be affected at the same time, and how badly your validators would be punished.

I disagree with @econoar here that these are worst case issues. These are more moderate level issues. Home UPS and Dual WAN address failures aren’t correlated with other users and so should be far down your list of concerns.

Internet/power failure

If you are validating from home, then it’s highly likely you’ll encounter one of these failures at some point in the future. Residential internet and power connections do not have guaranteed uptime. However, when the internet does go down, or your power is out, the outage is usually limited to your area and even then only for a few hours.

Unless you have very spotty internet/power, it might not be worthwhile paying for fall-over connections. You’ll receive a few hours of penalties, but as the rest of the network is running normally, your penalties will be roughly equal to what your rewards would have been over the same period. In other words, a k hour-long failure sets your validator’s balance back to roughly where it was k hours before the failure, and in k additional hours your validator’s balance will be back to its pre-failure amount.

[Validator #12661 regaining ETH as quickly as it was lost – Beaconcha.in

Hardware failure

Like internet failure, hardware failure strikes randomly, and when it does, your node might be down for a few days. It is valuable to consider the expected rewards over the lifetime of the validator versus the cost of redundant hardware. Is the expected value of the failure (the offline penalties times the chance of it happening) greater than the cost of the redundant hardware?

Personally, the chance of failure is low enough and the cost of fully redundant hardware high enough, that it almost certainly isn’t worth it. But then again, I am not a whale ; as with any failure scenario, you need to evaluate how this applies to your particular situation.

Cloud services failure

Maybe, to avoid the risks of hardware or internet failure altogether, you decide to go with a cloud provider. With a cloud provider, you have introduced the risk of correlated failures. The question that matters is, how many other validators are using the same cloud provider as you?

A week before genesis, Amazon AWS had a prolonged outage which affected a large portion of the web. If something similar were to happen now, enough validators would go offline at the same time that the inactivity penalties would kick in.

Even worse, if a cloud provider were to duplicate the VM running your node and accidentally leave the old and the new node running at the same time, you could be slashed (the penalties incurred would be especially bad if this accidental duplication affected many other nodes too).

If you are insistent on relying on a cloud provider, consider switching to a smaller provider. It may end up saving you a lot of ETH.

Staking Services

There are several staking services on mainnet today with varying degrees of decentralisation, but they all contain an increased risk of correlated failures if you trust them with your ETH. These services are necessary components of the eth2 ecosystem, especially for those with less than 32 ETH or without the technical know-how to stake, but they are architected by humans and therefore imperfect.

If staking pools eventually grow to be as large as eth1 mining pools, then it is conceivable that a bug could cause mass slashings or inactivity penalties for their members.

Infura Failure

Last month Infura went down for 6 hours causing outages across the Ethereum ecosystem; it is easy to see how this is likely to result in correlated failures for eth2 validators.

In addition, 3rd party eth1 API providers necessarily rate-limit calls to their service: In the past this has caused validators to be unable to produce valid blocks (on the Medalla testnet).

The best solution is to run your own eth1 node: you won’t encounter rate-limiting, it will reduce the likelihood of your failures being correlated, and it will improve the decentralisation of the network as a whole.

Eth2 clients have also started adding the possibility of specifying multiple eth1 nodes. This makes it easy to switch to a backup endpoint, in the event your primary endpoint fails (Lighthouse: –eth1-endpoints, Prysm: PR#8062, Nimbus & Teku will likely add support somewhere in the future).

I highly recommend adding backup API options as cheap/free insurance (EthereumNodes.com shows the free and paid API endpoints and their current status). This is useful whether you are running your own eth1 node or not.

Failure of a particular eth2 client

Despite all the code review, audits, and rockstar work, all of the eth2 clients have bugs hiding somewhere. Most of them are minor and will be caught before they present a major problem in production, but there is always the chance that the client you choose will go offline or cause you to be slashed. If this were to happen, you would not want to be running a client with > 1/3 of the nodes on the network.

You must strike a tradeoff between what you deem to be the best client vs how popular that client is. Consider reading through the documentation of another client so that if something happens to your node, you know what to expect in terms of installing and configuring a different client.

If you have lots of ETH at stake, it is probably worth running multiple clients each with some of your ETH to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Otherwise, Vouch is an interesting offering for multi-node staking infrastructure, and Secret Shared Validators are seeing rapid development.

Black swans

There are of course many unlikely, unpredictable, yet dangerous scenarios that will always present a risk. Scenarios that lie outside the obvious decisions about your staking set-up. Examples such as Spectre and Meltdown at the hardware level, or kernel bugs such as BleedingTooth hint at some of the hazards that exist across the entire hardware stack. By definition, it is not possible to entirely predict and avoid these problems, instead you generally must react after the fact.

What to worry about

Ultimately this comes down to calculating the expected value E(X) of a given failure: how likely an event is to happen, and what the penalties would be if it did. It is vital to consider these failures in the context of the rest of the eth2 network since the correlation greatly affects the penalties at hand. Comparing the expected cost of a failure to the cost of mitigating it will give you the rational answer as to whether it is worth getting in front of.

No one knows all the ways a node can fail, nor how likely each failure is, but by making individual estimates of the chances of each failure type and mitigating the biggest risks, the “wisdom of the crowd” will prevail and on average the network as a whole will make a good estimate. Furthermore, because of the different risks each validator faces, and the differing estimates of those risks, the failures you did not account for will be caught by others and therefore the degree of correlation will be reduced. Yay decentralisation!

DON’T PANIC

Finally, if something does happen to your node, don’t panic! Even during inactivity leaks, penalties are small on short time scales. Take a few moments to think through what happened and why. Then make a plan of action to fix the problem. Then take a deep breath before you proceed. An extra 5 minutes of penalties is preferable to being slashed because you did something ill-advised in a rush.

Most of all: Do not run 2 nodes with the same validator keys!

Thanks Danny Ryan, Joseph Schweitzer, and Sacha Yves Saint-Leger for review

[Slashings because validators ran >1 node – Beaconcha.in]

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure

The XRP price and its trajectory have been one of the most debated in the crypto community after a rapid surge that saw its price rise 600% back in 2024. Since then, the altcoin has slowed down and has been skirting support around the $2 level, with bears unable to break this level so far. With support holding so strong, expectations are that a renewed and sustained bullish momentum will begin, and this time, analysts are putting the XRP price in the double-digits.

XRP Price Forms Classic Bullish Flag Pattern

Crypto analyst Persian Blockchain has made bold predictions for the XRP price as the altcoin has seen the formation os a classic bullish flag pattern. This pattern emerged with the rise and subsequent fall in the XRP price and has continued to show signs of more bullishness to come.

One important factor that the crypto analyst points out is the fact that classic bullish flag patterns are a continuation structure. This means they often signal the start of an upward movement, most likely to push toward the previous peaks seen with the last rally.

As expected, there are still some resistances on the chart that the XRP price will have to clear. In this case, the crypto analyst highlights a level like the $2.7 resistance, which is the level to beat. As they explain, if the XRP price is able to successfully break above the resistance and then enter the buy zone, then a breakout could be expected.

The crypto analyst said: “A retest of the breakout area followed by bullish confirmation could signal the beginning of a larger move toward the $10 psychological level.” This would mean an over 400% move from the altcoin to push it toward brand new all-time highs.

Ripple Vs. SEC Lawsuit Plays A Role

So far, the long-running Ripple vs. SEC lawsuit has played a huge role in suppressing the XRP price over the years, and even now, continues to loom over the digital asset. There is yet to be a final conclusion to the legal battle, although the court’s rulings have been leaning toward a favorable outcome for Ripple.

The crypto analyst points to the SEC’s 60-day deadline coming to an end on June 16, and if the courts rule in favour of Ripple, then this could spark a fresh rally. Moreover, there has also been a rise in global liquidity, and as the stock market and Bitcoin are expected to rise, the XRP price will rise in tandem as one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the market.

A positive outcome and final conclusion to the SEC battle would renew confidence in XRP and possibly drive new investments. “The alignment of a legal breakthrough, improving macro liquidity, and a bullish chart structure makes this a scenario worth watching closely,” the analyst concluded.

Featured image from Dall.E, chart from TradingView.com

Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.

BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes says that the crypto market may be gearing up for a 2022-style breakout amid fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

In a new interview with the host of the Crypto Banter YouTube channel Ran Neuner, Hayes says central banks will likely boost money printing to address worsening macroeconomic conditions that could push Bitcoin (BTC) and other crypto assets to much higher valuations.

“I think that the setup is just perfect for a rally in risk assets, just like we saw from the third quarter of 2022 until early 2025. There’s a similar setup today. We have a lot of fear, uncertainty, doubt in the markets, and the monetary authorities, especially in America, cannot handle that, so they’re going to resort to money printing…

This is all about the Treasury. [Former US Treasury Secretary] Janet Yellen printed $2.5 trillion from 2022 to 2025. Bitcoin went up 6x. [US Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent has to do something similar. And so that’s why April 9th was the bottom, and we’re going to go much higher from here.”

Hayes also predicts that the Bitcoin dominance (BTC.D) metric may soon enter a downward phase after tagging the 70% level, setting alts up to outperform the flagship crypto asset.

BTC.D calculates how much of the crypto market cap belongs to BTC. Bitcoin dominance currently stands at 64.81%.

“I think Bitcoin dominance goes to 70%-ish. Bitcoin goes to the $150,000 level, something around there. And then we start to get the rotation into altcoins.”

Bitcoin is trading for $94,030 at time of writing, down 1.8% in the last 24 hours.

Follow us on X, Facebook and Telegram

Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inbox

Check Price Action

Surf The Daily Hodl Mix

&nbsp

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.

Generated Image: Midjourney