Ethereum (ETH) Price Shoots Past $4750 Levels, Prepares for the Next Bull Run
The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) continues it mega bull run for the year of 2021. Earlier today, Ethereum (ETH) gained an additional 5% hitting a new all-time high above $4750 levels while entering the price discovery zone.
As of press time, Ethereum (ETH) is trading at $4741 levels with a market cap of $560 billion. The recent ETH price surge comes amid the growing strength of the overall cryptocurrency space. Ethereum’s top rival Bitcoin has also gained 5% on Monday and is currently trading close to its all-time high levels of $66,000.
Ethereum’s rally so far this year has come on the backdrop of the growing excitement about decentralized finance (DeFi). The Ethereum blockchain caters to some of the core feature of DeFi like decentralized lending and decentralized trading on the blockchain.
The Ethereum blockchain has been one of the biggest platforms for hosting DeFi protocols. Some of the world’s biggest DeFi services like lending platform Aave and decentralized exchange Uniswap currently run on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain network.
However, the rapid rise of DeFi on Ethereum is slowly driving the attention of regulators with experts noting that an imminent crackdown could be coming anytime soon. Apart from DeFi, the Ethereum blockchain has been the backbone of several non-fungible tokens popular as NFTs.
These blockchain-based NFTs are unique digital tokens often used to represent rare or scarce elements. The NFT activity has skyrocketed this year with some NFTs being sold for millions-of-dollars.
On the other hand, the Ethereum blockchain is undergoing a major upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 Proof-of-Stake (PoS). This will make the Ethereum network faster as well as environmentally friendly. The latest upgrade to the Ethereum network has been the Altair upgrade introduced last month.
But as ETH continues to make big gains, it still faces the challenge of high gas fee and scalability. As a result, several Ethereum alternative have been gaining momentum this year.
Solana (SOL) is one such Ethereum-killer that has been making much noise recently and has touched a new all-time high along with ETH to enter the top-five crypto spot. The SOL price has gained a staggering 16000% this year and hit an all-time high of $262 on Monday, November 8.
The Solana blockchain has a transaction throughput of 70,000 TPS with a very low gas fee. Furthermore, Solana has also been a preferred choice for several DeFi applications. The total value locked (TVL) for all DeFi protocols on Solana has crossed $15 billion.