Ethereum price corrects slightly but near-term target still fixed at $5,000
Ethereum’s monthly gains currently stand at an impressive 36.7%.
- The Ethereum (ETH) network’s native gas fee rates have been hovering close to the $50 mark recently.
- The total amount of capital locked into various ETH-based smart contracts currently stands at $94 billion.
- Ethereum’s market dominance index (DI) is presently at 19%.
Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalization, has been on a tear recently. The asset recently scaled up to an all-time high of $4,878. It then showcased a slight correction following certain profit-taking activities witnessed when the industry hit a total market cap of $3 trillion. At press time, ETH is trading at $4,610.
The recent uptick in ETH’s network usage resulted in not only the currency’s pricing increasing substantially but its associated gas fees surging to relative highs. Over the last couple of days, the average cost of facilitating a transaction on the Ethereum ecosystem has been hovering around the $50 range. Despite this massive rise, technical data suggests that it is only a matter of time until ETH breaks through the all-important $5K psychological threshold.
Despite these transaction charges, the total value locked across Ethereum’s various smart contracts recently rose to an all-time high of $94 billion, thereby representing a growth of more than 40% over the last 90 days. Such data clearly shows there is a growing appetite for ETH-based DeFi products and other associated offerings such as nonfungible tokens (NFT), price oracles and decentralized marketplaces.
DEXs severely outpacing CEXs but Binance is still king
As per data released by crypto analytics firm Chainalysis, the total number of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) in existence has increased by more than 100% between Q1 2019 and Q3 2021, while the amount of centralized exchanges (CEX) has remained nearly the same. The increased popularity of these platforms can largely be attributed to the growth of the DeFi market, which has grown from $25 billion to over $112 billion in 2021 alone.
That said, Binance continues to tower above all its closest competitors, despite facing increased regulatory scrutiny over the last couple of months. According to info available online, Binance registered a total of 171 million visitors in October, showcasing a 12% growth from the month prior. Binance’s closest competition is Coinbase, a platform that witnessed a total of 91 million visitors last month, followed by PancakeSwap, a BSC-based DEX that saw 25 million visitors.
Eth2 staking service reaches stage two cap in under a minute
The recent launch of Ethereum 2.0 staking service Rocket Pool saw its stage two cap being met in a meager 45 seconds as per info made public by Allnodes. Within the first 48 hours of going live, Rocket pool amassed 237 node operators globally, with a total of 1,088 ETH being staked in its crypto pools.
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
