ethereum price: Ethereum jumps to record high amid crypto’s decentralized boom

By Eric Lam and Crys­tal Kim


Ether, the sec­ond-largest cryp­tocur­ren­cy, soared to a record above $4,400 Fri­day on bull­ish sen­ti­ment sur­round­ing the most used blockchain network. 

The dig­i­tal asset gained as much as 4.8% to $4,459.20, top­ping the pre­vi­ous record of $4,379.62 in May. The token trad­ed around $4,387 as of 2:41 p.m. in New York. Oth­er tokens includ­ing Binance Coin and Solana ral­lied. Ether is now worth more than $520 bil­lion, accord­ing to data from CoinGecko.com.

Ether’s lat­est mile­stone comes as the dig­i­tal token has far out­per­formed Bit­coin through­out this year with a six­fold increase amid surg­ing retail and insti­tu­tion­al investor inter­est in the space. 

Ether under­pins the affil­i­at­ed Ethereum Net­work, the dom­i­nant blockchain used for thou­sands of decen­tral­ized appli­ca­tions. The sys­tem got a fur­ther boost this week after a suc­cess­ful upgrade designed to make it faster and more energy-efficient.

Out­stand­ing futures in Ether soared to $12.5 bil­lion, exceed­ing the May peak to notch a new record high, Bybt data show. Sim­i­lar to Bit­coin, fund­ing rates — or the cost of keep­ing a bull­ish bet open — have climbed this month on online exchanges. On CME, the futures curve has also steep­ened in a sign of opti­mism over the price trajectory. 

“On-chain activ­i­ty met­rics for Ethereum appear to have found sup­port and are reach­ing mul­ti-month highs,” said Sean Far­rell and Will McEvoy, dig­i­tal asset strate­gists with Fund­strat in a report Thurs­day. Mea­sures includ­ing trans­ac­tion rate, new address­es and active address­es have shown strong growth this month after suf­fer­ing declines in May, the strate­gists said. 

Mean­while, some ana­lysts point­ed to a con­nec­tion between the rise in the uber-pop­u­lar Shi­ba Inu coin and Ether’s record. 

Ethereum’s EIP 1559 upgrade was imple­ment­ed in August — and this burns a por­tion of fees paid to min­ers, reduc­ing net issuance as a func­tion of net­work usage, said Sam Doc­tor, chief strat­e­gy offi­cer and head of research at BitOo­da, a reg­u­lat­ed cryp­to brokerage. 

“So if Shi­ba Inu gen­er­ates a lot of traf­fic, it increas­es net­work con­ges­tion and con­tributes to more ETH being burned,” he said. “That slows the net growth in ETH in cir­cu­la­tion. Tighter ETH sup­ply com­bined with high net­work usage like­ly drove Ether’s price up.” 

Bit­coin rose some 40% this month to reach a record of almost $67,000 fol­low­ing the debut of the first Bit­coin-linked exchange-trad­ed fund in the U.S. The world’s biggest dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy was 1.6% high­er in New-York trad­ing at $62,405.