ETH Hits New All-Time-High Above $3,000
2 min read
The price of ETH, the second-largest coin by market cap, hit $3,000 for the first time on Sunday evening, according to data from Coinstats. After breaking that bar, it continued to a new all-time-high of $3,025.
ETH’s rise this week follows reports that the European Investment Bank (EIB) sold $121 million worth of digital bonds on ETH. Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale and Banco Santander also played a role in the EIB’s bond sale, Bloomberg Law reported. The news was treated as another sign of ETH’s staying power for a myriad of financial use cases.
The EIB used ETH because the network allows for the creation of multiple fungible tokens, known as ERC-20 tokens. The EIB test came after Santander used ETH mainnet for its own blockchain bonds in September 2019. Both are big endorsements of the network.
The ETH times are a-changin’
A number of highly-anticipated updates to ETH are set to go live over the next couple of months.
On July 14, ETH will integrate an upgrade called EIP-1559. The upgrade will reduce ETH’s overall supply by burning billions of coins that would otherwise have gone to miners.
As per the laws of supply and demand, the widespread expectation is that EIP-1559 will increase the price of ETH. Perhaps, the mere anticipation of the upgrade is already having that effect.
Then there’s the larger transition toward ETH 2.0. This switches the network to proof-of-stake, rather than the current energy-intensive proof-of-work. The first step of this transition is the so-called merge, provisionally scheduled for late 2021. ETH 2.0 also promises to lower transaction costs and increase the throughput of the network.
Historically, BTC spearheaded price changes in the crypto market, tailgated by altcoins including ETH. But the tide is shifting.
At the start of this year, BTC accounted for about 70% of the market, and ETH 12.8%. Now, BTC accounts for 50% of the market, and ETH 14.65%. Binance Coin (BNB) increased its dominance by four times, to 4%, in the same period.
And according to Money Movers, which tracks the daily volume of settlements on the two networks, ETH handles almost double the size of BTC.
The coins were neck and neck only four months ago. But four months ago, ETH’s white-hot NFT craze was just beginning. And decentralized finance (DeFi), also mostly powered by ETH, is now bigger than ever.
m00d pic.twitter.com/IlEjYSn6M9
— pplpleasr (@pplpleasr1) January 4, 2021
