Ethereum’s price breaks the $4,000 mark
After a brief dip, ETH is now trading comfortably above $4,100.
- Ether is currently showcasing daily gains of 4+%
- Ethereum’s market dominance is at a two-year high of 19.4%
- The currency’s total market capitalization now hovers just under the $500 million mark.
It’s no secret that Ether has been on a tear over the last couple of weeks, with the second-largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalization scaling up to new all-time highs seemingly every other day. At press time, the premier altcoin is trading at $4,176.
Thanks to its ongoing price action, ETH’s market dominance index has continued to grow. Ether’s dominance ratio is currently at its highest levels — 19.4% — since February 2018, a time when the crypto sector as a whole was still riding high thanks to the then ongoing ICO frenzy that saw the value of many tokens rise to unrealistic levels within extremely short periods of time.
To get a better idea of what’s causing Ether to explode and where the currency might be headed in the near-to-mid term, Finder spoke with Sidharth Sogani, CEO and founder of crypto and blockchain data provider CREBACO Inc. In his view, the reasons for ETH soaring are manifold:
“Ethereum has just undergone the Berlin hard fork and continues to witness an increasing amount of DeFi-oriented activity across its ecosystem. Not only that, another reason why ETH is soaring is that people are beginning to see the currency’s market share growth in comparison to BTC.”
That said, while average transaction costs on the Ether network had been reduced following the Berlin upgrade, fee rates have once again skyrocketed, with the figure currently laying north of the $64 mark.
Some of the other aspects that Sogani believes may be helping Ether grow include the currency’s ever-reducing supply thanks to staking and the fact that more and more people are beginning to move their digital assets to hardware wallets.
What lies ahead?
Ethereum’s market cap has been growing at a staggering rate, with the figure currently lying just under $500 million. As a result, the currency’s year-to-date gains stand at 550+%, a number that’s considerably higher than Bitcoin’s profit ratio, which currently lies around the 100% mark.
ETH has been on the receiving end of a lot of institutional interest recently. In this regard, it’s estimated that major players have already acquired around $40 billion worth of the digital currency over the last couple of weeks.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
Picture: Finder
