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Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency breaks through its all-time-high as institutional investors take a closer look at the huge potential of the Ethereum blockchain.
By Matt Hussey
January is all about Ethereum. The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has been surging in 2021, and over the weekend, broke through its previous all-time high of $1,439. A record it set only a week before.
In fact, on January 1, Ethereum’s price sat around $730, but in the last 25 days has doubled, according to data provider Nomics. Compared to Bitcoin, which has had a bumpy start to the year, Ethereum’s year to date growth is around 88%, whereas Bitcoin’s is only 10%. What’s going on here?
DeFi is back. The catch-all term for decentralized finance or projects that provide access to lending and staking services has come back to life.
After the summer of 2020 which saw projects offer 1,000% returns on staking pools, but little transparency over how those pools operated, the more established players appear to have hit a purple patch.
Aave, an open-source protocol for borrowing and lending is up 11% over the last 24 hours, on the back of four days of strong growth.
Uniswap, and its underlying governance token, UNI is up 20%, as is the Synthetix Network Token - a decentralized payment network - which saw 7% gains in the last 24 hours.
Even SushiSwap, the decentralized exchange that epitomized the highs, and the lows of the yield farming craze of 2020, is up nearly 10%, and its underlying token SUSHI, has beaten its previous all-time high price of $8.71 set on September 1, 2020.
All of which helps to push up the price of ETH, as these projects all use Ethereum’s ERC token standard to create new tokens. This has led institutional investors - those big buyers who went in search of exotic assets after the March 2020 market crash and found Bitcoin - to take a closer look at Ethereum as another investment with huge potential.
Futures contracts, a key avenue for investors to gain exposure to crypto price movements, broke all-time-highs last week as $4.5 billion worth of bets were placed on Ethereum’s price.
Trading volumes on the network have also shot up. More than $1 trillion in transactions passed through Ethereum in 2020, putting it roughly on par with payments giant, PayPal. All of which suggests the Eth bull run is set to continue.
Article produced by Matt Hussey - Read the full article:
By Alisha Roy
Hot on the heels of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, registering its own ATH a few weeks ago, it would seem that the world’s largest altcoin is intent on replicating BTC’s performance as well. Ether has now breached its previous ATH and registered a new high at $1476 in the early hours of 25 Jan.
At the time of writing, ETH was valued at $1435, having seen a surge of close to 10 percent in the past 24 hours. This is interesting since the altcoin also surged to become one of the world’s top-100 assets by market cap at the start of the month.
Ethereum entered the top 100 assets by market
Source: https://t.co/oDzWrvLl2b pic.twitter.com/63zrsalRfH— CompaniesMarketCap.com (@CompaniesMarke1) January 6, 2021
ETH has been noting bullish momentum in the past few days despite Bitcoin continuing to remaining around the $33,000 price range. In fact, it breached the $1000-mark a few weeks ago and despite corrections and continued to mostly trade above the said level.
The bullishness in Ethereum’s market was recently highlighted by Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex, in a release shared with AMBCrypto,
“The renewed interest in Ethereum isn’t a huge surprise given the strength of confidence in Bitcoin among institutional investors. Part of the profit taken on Bitcoin during this retracement may have been reinvested in Ethereum.”
Ardoino isn’t the only one to talk up Ethereum, however, with an earlier prediction stating that institutions will plan to purchase ETH this year, especially in light of the 8 February launch of ETH Futures on CME.
CME futures is the writing on the wall.
They wouldn’t launch an $ETH product if there wasn’t any demand for it.
— Ryan Watkins (@RyanWatkins_) December 27, 2020
However, the crypto’s price gains could also be due to the release of Ethereum 2.0, among other reasons.
Previously, the original Ethereum network had attracted some negative comments. Moreover, even as DeFi’s Total Value Locked amounted to a whopping $20.5 billion on 6 January, the strain on the network had been intense for some time.
In October 2020, entities even began to look for Ethereum alternatives. For instance, SingularityNet, which complained about the slowness of the Ethereum network and the blockchain’s high gas fees, decided to migrate some of its network onto the Cardano blockchain.
Despite such issues that have for long plagued the network in 2020, the price of ETH has continued to rally. Additionally, Ether volumes have surged over the past month, according to data from CryptoCompare.
ETH’s last ATH of $1,448 was touched back in January 2018. In light of a booming DeFi economy, the phased Ethereum 2 upgrade, and the Bitcoin rally, it would seem that more ATHs may be in the future for the world’s largest altcoin.
Article produced by Alisha Roy - Read the full article:
