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Crypto Long & Short: Bitcoin’s Potential as a Collateral Class

Noelle Acheson
Updated ·2-min read

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, went above $3,000 Sunday for the first time in history, according to CoinDesk 20, after setting multiple all-time highs last week.

  • At press time, ether’s changing hands at $3,026, up more than 2.5% in the past 24 hours.

  • Ether is now up about 300% on a year-to-date basis versus a 95% rise for bitcoin.

  • Ether’s impressive gains came as the demand for the second most valued cryptocurrency has soared.

  • The total market capitalization for decentralization finance (DeFi), recently hit above $100 billion, with some of the most popular DeFi projects being built on the Ethereum blockchain.

  • There are more than $68 billion worth of value locked in DeFi, per data from DeFi Pulse.

  • CoinMetrics data shows the number of active addresses recently surged to a new all-time high of 771,000, surpassing the previous record of 739,000 set in November.

  • The daily transaction count on Ethereum’s blockchain has increased by 22% to 1.376 million this year, per data provided by Glassnode.

  • Ether’s growth also came as the Ethereum blockchain undergoes the Eth 2.0 upgrade, which will switch the Ethereum blockchain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus from the current proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

  • Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin gave a presentation recently on the development roadmap of Ethereum after its merge to PoS including the long-awaited feature, sharding.

  • Sharding will expand Ethereum’s capacity to process transactions by splitting its database into 64 new mini-blockchains, thus addressing the congestion issues that currently plague the blockchain..

  • The rise of ether has also benefited tokens associated with several so-called Ethereum killers such as Binance Smart Chain, Solana, and Polkadot.

  • As CoinDesk reported, FundStrat wrote in a research note Thursday that ether could hit above $10,000 by the end of this year.

  • “Ethereum’s market cap has risen to ~30% of bitcoin’s over recent weeks,” the note read. “During the last market cycle, ethereum broke this level and [had] as high as 80% of bitcoin’s value.”

Omkar Godbole contributed to the reporting.

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