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Ethereum, the world’s most-used blockchain by daily transactions and the second-largest by market cap, broke the $3,000 price level in the early hours Monday, data from multiple sources shows.
#ethereum has officially cracked the $3,000 mark!!! Not on all exchanges, but this is a big moment.
— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) May 3, 2021
Its native token, ETH, powers the network and facilitates millions of other decentralized applications (dApps) and protocols that run atop. With the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi)—over $70 billion is now locked in such apps—and other ground-breaking innovations in the past year, demand for ETH continues to grow.
As the below image shows, ETH broke out of its $2,600 resistance zone last week and inched upwards steadily. It saw some resistance at the $2,950 level, but saw massive buys in the Asian hours today. As such, ETH remains in a strong uptrend, as the exponential moving average, a popular tool used by traders to determine market trend based on previous average prices, shows.
The rally means ETH is up over 300% for the year so far, and up by over 1,300% in the past year (even trading at $90 in mid-March after a broader market plunge).
Institutional games and surpassing BoA
Some wealth managers say the move is “catch-up” to Bitcoin’s price action over the past year. “At first, the rally was really led by Bitcoin because like a lot of the institutional investors came into the space, that would be their natural first port of call,” said James Quinn, managing director at crypto fund Q9 Capital.
He added:
“But as the rally has matured over the last six months, you have DeFi and a lot of DeFi is built on Ethereum.”
Several Ethereum-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and products (ETPs) have launched in the past year, suggesting there was a significant amount of institutional inflows into the asset apart from Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, some on Twitter pointed out Ethereum’s total market cap, a measure of price and the total supply (115 million at press time) now surpassed those of the Bank of America, one of the world’s biggest financial institutions.
#Ethereum has a bigger market cap than Bank Of America 🔥🔥 historical moment in history pic.twitter.com/R29QJDBpWc
— BAE (@Dougy_buller) May 3, 2021
An iconic day for many in the crypto space.