Ether, the main token issued on the original Ethereum blockchain, has been going through a period of highly volatile trading, but a fundamental news development seems to be doing the trick for this cryptocurrency. On the first Sunday of July, millions of Americans were enjoying a long holiday weekend with fireworks, barbecue parties, and plenty of hope for the near future. On major digital currency trading platforms, the sentiment surrounding ETH/USD was quite positive, and traders pushed the exchange price to $2,350.

This two-week high for Ether should not be dismissed as a flash in the pan. This latest rally is taking place at a time when Bitcoin seems to have reached the bottom of the market correction, but we should not ignore that the Ethereum network is preparing for a hard fork. So, what should we expect from the ETH price over the coming weeks? Here’s what you need to know about Ether this week.

A Look Back at a Very Bullish Week for ETH

As the week was coming to a close, it was already clear that this could be a significant month for ETH, as the number one cryptocurrency was able to gain upwards of 6.5% against the US Dollar in just a matter of two weeks.

Ether came up from a slump on June 16th, the result of a very strong week for Ethereum-related services, in particular, decentralized applications. At that point, the exchange rate was already representing a 45% climb from the levels of early June.

During the past two days, Ethereum managed to maintain a relatively steady $2,350 price for the most part. It is the high watermark for the digital asset since that point, but many experts are starting to look to the near future.

Ethereum Hard Fork Preparing for Implementation

As we saw in recent weeks, Ether has been able to gain such momentum partly due to an upcoming hard fork on July 16th. The upgrade is called London, and was designed to create two new features: Proof of Stake (PoS) and Sharding. With each of these features, the number of transactions performed per second increases significantly.

PoS aims to give Ethereum the capability to accept all new applications, as the process would not require miners to process all transactions. While Sharding will allow for improved scaling through the network by taking smaller slices of information and sending them to different parts of the network.