Ethereum hits new record high above $3,400, extending its more than 300% rally this year

Ethereum hits new record high above $3,400, extending its more than 300% rally this year

GUANGZHOU, China — Ether, the digital coin linked to the Ethereum blockchain, hit an all-time high of $3,456.57 as the cryptocurrency extends a rally that has seen its price gain over 350% this year.

The digital coin pared some of those gains in Tuesday morning trade in London and was trading at $3,369.74 at 11:20 a.m., according to CoinDesk data.

Interest in cryptocurrencies has surged over the past year with bitcoin continuously pushing new record highs. A number of factors including rising institutional interest and major companies such as Tesla buying the digital coin have been credited with its rise.

Bitcoin has been described as “digital gold” or a store of value in times of geopolitical tumult or financial market volatility as well as a hedge against inflation.

But Ethereum is different. It acts more as a platform that developers can build apps on. Ethereum is the name of the network or underlying blockchain technology, while ether is the digital currency used to power the platform.

Dogecoin and ethereum climb to record-highs as institutional interest ramps up

Visual representations of digital cryptocurrencies. Photo: Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images

Cryptocurrencies dogecoin (DOGE-USD) and ethereum (ETH-USD) hit all-time highs on Tuesday morning in London following a rise in institutional interest in both tokens.

The joke token dogecoin was up more than 47%, to trade at around $0.48 by 2.45pm in London. Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency, broke the $3,500 mark earlier in the session to trade around 12% higher.

Ethereum’s previous all-time high was $3,456.57 (£2,489.18)— a consolidation of a rally of around 360% this year alone.

Meanwhile, bitcoin (BTC-USD) was down by around 4.5%.

“Even though ETH’s price is touching highs unseen before, we can assess its potential for appreciation by looking at the ETH/BTC pair, which is still trading well below its all-time-high over 0.15 BTC,” said Joe DiPasquale, CEO of cryptocurrency hedge fund BitBull Capital.

“The most recent resistance level on the ETH/BTC pair was 0.05, which has now been broken, and we can expect ETH to trade as high as 0.07 before meeting any significant resistance.

“Although there’s room to grow, given that ETH’s USD price has gone up significantly in a short period of time, we are likely to see a retracement towards $3,000 before another move up. But keeping the ETH/BTC ATH in mind, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a $5,000 ETH soon.”

Dogecoin’s wild month. Chart: Yahoo Finance UK

Ethereum’s rise has been pegged to the growing number of developers building decentralised finance or “DeFi” applications on its blockchain platform, as well as a growing institutional interest in crypto as a market.

Among others, the European Investment Bank has said it will issue its first ever digital bond on a public blockchain using ethereum’s technology.

Meanwhile, the meme-inspired dogecoin also surged off the back of trading platform eToro saying it would offer it to its 20 million users.

The token has rallied around 250% from its intra-day low on 23 April, according to currency watchers FX Street.

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It was trending on Twitter by the afternoon in London spurred by nearly 300,000 tweets.

Cryptocurrency trading platform Gemini also said it would take deposits of doge, with trading opening shortly.

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The moves also follow an announcement by online banking platform Revolut that it will soon allow people to directly withdraw bitcoin from their platform. This would challenge the status quo set by other platforms such as Robinhood and PayPal (PYPL), that prevent bitcoin bought on their platforms being moved elsewhere.

News also eked out over the bank holiday weekend that PayPal is mulling creating its own stablecoin — a cryptocurrency that attempts to peg its market value to some external reference.

Bitcoins fall continues following news on Friday that it had surpassed a closely-watch technical hurdle, which is usually a precursor to further gains. It had climbed past its price average over the past 50 days which is usually seen as a measure of momentum.

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Ethereum’s 27-year-old creator is now a billionaire

New York (CNN Business) Vitalik Buterin, a 27-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer, created ethereum in 2013 when he was 19. The cryptocurrency launched in 2015, and now Buterin holds about 333,500 ether in his public wallet. Multiply that by the $3,500 record high ether stood at on Tuesday, and you get more than $1.1 billion. Not bad.

Buterin co-founded Bitcoin Magazine , a publication that covers bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in 2012. In 2014, he was selected to be part of the Thiel Fellowship , a two-year program created by billionaire Peter Thiel that “gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”

He isn’t super active on social media — surprising for a guy with 1.4 million Twitter followers.

Ether prices have more than quadrupled in 2021, soaring 375%. The cryptocurrency is currently the second-largest digital currency by market value — a bit less than half the market capitalization of bitcoin. The total value of all ethereum in circulation is now about $403 billion according to CoinMarketCap . One ether was priced at $3,482 on Tuesday.

Although investors buy and sell thousands of different cryptocurrencies — including the Elon Musk tweet-fueled dogecoin — ether and bitcoin account for nearly two-thirds of the entire $2.3 trillion global crypto market.

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