Ethereum surpasses JPMorgan as altcoins set a new market record

• Shiba Inu and Ethereum have been among the tokens hitting new highs this week as the altcoin market set a new all-time high just shy of $1.5 trillion.
• Shiba has overtaken its memecoin rival DOGE and is now the ninth-largest cryptocurrency, with yet another memecoin seeing 315 percent gains in the past week.

It’s been the week of altcoins and we now have a new market cap record. Bitcoin has held on steadily above the $60,000 mark, despite a brief tumble on Wednesday. But it’s the altcoins that have impressed the most, with Ethereum leading the rally. Ether hit a new all-time high this week, propelling the altcoin market cap to eclipse a record it set in May, just shy of the $1.5 trillion mark.

Ethereum hit its new ATH on Friday at $4,456, shooting past its previous high at $4,200 which it set at the peak of the mid-May bull run. The cryptocurrency is now trading at $4,319 after an 8 percent weekly gain. Its dominance now stands at 19.5 percent, close to half that of Bitcoin. The highest that ETH’s dominance has been was at 31 percent during the ICO hype period in 2017.

With a market cap of $510 billion, Ethereum has now surpassed the largest bank in the U.S, JPMorgan, becoming the second cryptocurrency after Bitcoin to achieve this milestone. The altcoin is now also more valuable than Visa, Alibaba, Walmart and Samsung.

Read More: As Ethereum ushers in the Altair upgrade, ETH marks new all-time high

The rise of the alts

As Ethereum leads the pack, other altcoins are recording massive gains of their own as the rankings become increasingly competitive. As CNF reported, Shiba Inu has now become the king of memecoins after overtaking the original memecoin DOGE.

As it stands, SHIB is now $3 billion more valuable than DOGE at $40.3 billion. In the past week Shiba Inu has gained 163 percent to shoot its way into the top ten. And the volume backs the movement as well and shows that investors have been taking a keen interest in the memecoin. In the past day, SHIB had the fourth-highest trading volume at $10.8 billion. This was three times higher than XRP and four times the Binance Coin trading volume.

In the top 100, Dogelon Mars has seen the biggest gains in the past week, recording a 314 percent rise. The cryptocurrency embraces the ‘joke-coin’ narrative fully, claiming on its website to be an interplanetary currency. It’s named after Dogelon Mars, who was born on Mars in the year 2420 and traveled back in time to develop the currency as he prepares to take back his home planet from the Annihilators (and no, I didn’t make any of that up).

Decentraland, Helium, Curve DAO Token, THORChain, Enjin Coin and Sandbox are the other altcoins that have seen notable gains in the past week.