Ethereum Jumps 21% Higher This Week, Second Largest Crypto Market Nears All-Time High

After bitcoin reached its all-time high (ATH) on Wednesday, the second-largest crypto asset in terms of market capitalization, ethereum, is nearing its own ATH. The last time the crypto asset hit an ATH was five months ago on May 12.

The digital currency ethereum (ETH) came awfully close to surpassing its all-time high this week, reaching $4,379 per unit on the exchange Deribit. That’s only 0.1141% away from the ATH ethereum tapped five months ago ($4,384) on May 12, 2021.

Ethereum’s market movements have been slower over the last week, taking a backseat to bitcoin (BTC) after the first U.S.-based bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) was launched. Three days after the listing, ethereum and a slew of other crypto assets started to pick up the pace in terms of market performance.

Seven-day statistics show ethereum is up 21.0% this week and during the last month, ether has risen 46.5%. Year-to-date, ether has gained more than BTC, rising 1,084.4% during the last 12 months. ETH has a market capitalization of $513.6 billion today and is hovering at half of a $1 trillion market cap. Additionally, ether is much more valuable than it was during the bull run in 2017, as it has increased 8,985% since the high in December that year.

As far as dominance is concerned, BTC currently has 44.5% of the aggregate market cap of $2.79 trillion. Ether has 18.3% and its dominance has increased a great deal during the last 48 hours. At the time of writing, Ethereum’s network hashrate is 717 terahash per second (TH/s) which is equal to 0.717 petahash per second (PH/s). Ethereum proponents that stake ETH with a validator get around 4.89% annualized staking yield.

The top trading pair with ethereum today is tether (USDT) with 43.85% of all ether trades on Thursday. This is followed by USD (19.46%), BTC (12.11%), BUSD (7.38%), EUR (4.14%), KRW (2.68%), and JPY (1.74%). The top exchanges swapping the most ether today include Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Huobi Pro, Bitforex, and Huobi Japan.

Furthermore, there is $240 billion total value locked in decentralized finance (defi) today and the Ethereum network commands $165.25 billion of that aggregate total. That’s 45.45% of the entire TVL in defi today which is lower than ETH’s 69% defi dominance just a few weeks ago.

Today there’s $86.25 billion in stablecoins on Ethereum, alongside 284,009 BTC, or $18.4 billion using today’s BTC exchange rates. Charts measuring bridges to Ethereum indicate there is $15.29 billion in cross-chain bridge funds held.

What do you think about ether’s market performance this week and the second-largest crypto asset nearing its all-time high? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.