Today, Ethereum broke through $3,300 and hit a record high.
According to AssetDash data, the market capitalization of Ethereum has risen to the 18th place in global assets, currently about $390.609 billion, surpassing Nvidia and MasterCard, and Bank of America is now ranked 24th.
Standard & Poor’s Dow Jones Indices Co., Ltd. released the Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto indexes on Monday. By comparing the two indices, we can see that the year-to-date value of Bitcoin has increased by 95.67%, while the year-to-date value of ETH has increased by 273.72%.
Ki Young Ju, CEO of South Korean crypto analysis start-up CryptoQuant, believes that the strong price movement of Ethereum is due to the massive purchase of ETH by institutional investors.
Digital payment and financial technology company Mogo Inc. (NASDAQ: MOGO) announced today that it has purchased approximately 146 Ethereum and plans to invest 5% of its cash and portfolio value in cryptocurrencies.
Ethereum 2.0 successfully completed the PoS merger in the developer test network. Ethereum 2.0 developer Diederik Loerakker said that the testnet is now in a rather unstable state and is more of a tool for developers to debug the client. More user-centric testnets will be run in the coming weeks.
There are multiple factors for the rise of Ethereum. The first is the continuous surge in activities on the chain, including those from institutional entities: The European Investment Bank announced that it will work with banking entities such as Goldman Sachs to issue two-year Crypto bonds worth US$121 million. Retail investors’ interest in DeFi has also been on the rise recently, with the total value locked in reaching more than US$100 billion.
However, the “London” hard fork, including the EIP-1559 upgrade of the Ethereum fee structure, and the subsequent transition of ETH 2.0 to the proof-of-stake consensus model, may be the main events that investors expect. These upgrades to the network are expected to greatly reduce costs and reduce the amount of ETH rewarded to miners, which in turn is expected to reduce seller pressure on ETH.
The popular New Zealand crypto analyst Lark Davis reiterated his price target of $10,000 for Ethereum on Twitter today.
Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz pointed out that the market value of Ethereum is now higher than all banks in the world except JPMorgan Chase.
Due to the skyrocketing price of Ethereum, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin became the youngest crypto billionaire. He wrote the original Ethereum white paper and published it on his blog in December 2013. According to the data on the Etherscan chain, Vitalik Buterin’s main wallet address holds approximately 333,500 ETH.
The world’s top investment bank JP Morgan Chase stated in a research report that Ethereum has outperformed Bitcoin in the near term. It believes that the liquidity of Ethereum is more flexible. During the market recovery phase, the trading depth of Ethereum recovered rapidly. At the same time, the spot exchange rate of Ethereum is much higher than that of Bitcoin.
Regarding the increase in the price of Ethereum, FundStrat, a market research company, said that as the Ethereum network is developing new financial applications, the scale of Ethereum has grown significantly. Since the second half of 2020, on-chain projects including the concepts of DeFi and NFT have emerged one after another, continuing to create the “myth of wealth creation”.
The sharp rise of Ethereum has even triggered new speculation that Ethereum may “subvert” Bitcoin and replace Bitcoin as the world’s largest Crypto currency.