In the early hours of Monday morning, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency briefly broke records after hitting $1,467.78.
Slowly but surely, Ether is pushing itself into uncharted territory.
In the early hours of Monday morning, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency briefly broke records after hitting $1,467.78.
That’s about $35 higher than the previous ATH of $1,432.88 that was set three years ago this month, CoinMarketCap data shows.
As the steam continues to escape the Bitcoin markets, some analysts believe Ether has the potential to continue delivering outsized gains as 2021 gets underway.
Over the past 24 hours, Ether has gained 7.5%, while Bitcoin is up just 1.6%. Zoom out to the past seven days, and ETH is up 16.5%, while BTC’s price has plummeted by 7.5%.
Bitcoin has also largely handed back much of the gains that it has generated so far this year. That’s a stark contrast to Ether, which has seen its price almost double from $735 since 2021 began.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s been causing ETH to rally so impressively, given how the total value locked in decentralized finance protocols shows no sign of slowing down.
On Jan. 1, research from DeFi Pulse suggested that about $15 billion was locked into these platforms. At the time of writing, this has surged to $26.5 billion. All 30 of the top protocols — including the likes of Maker, Aave, Compound and Uniswap — are based on the Ethereum blockchain.
Some analysts believe that we may be starting to see investors explore alternative digital currencies now that momentum is no longer behind Bitcoin.
Nuggets News CEO and co-founder Alex Saunders recently announced that he was raising his price target for ETH to $10,000 — pointing to how the Ethereum blockchain now processes more transactions than Bitcoin, and also has other use cases including non-fungible tokens and gaming.
Subscribe To Our Newsletter!
For the top stories delivered straight to your inbox, sign up to the free CoinMarketCap newsletter.
