ETH has risen by 6.24% in the past 24 hours, hitting $4,733.10. It's also risen by 11.74% over the past seven days.
As Bitcoin stagnates, investor attention is increasingly turning to Ether.
While BTC is flat right now — both on a 24-hour and seven-day timeframe — the world's second-largest cryptocurrency is on a tear right now, and is coming tantalizingly close to hitting new record highs.
ETH has risen by 6.24% in the past 24 hours, hitting $4,733.10. It's also risen by 11.74% over the past seven days.
These gains mean Ether is trading at a mere 2.6% discount to an all-time high of $4,859 set three weeks ago today. By comparison, Bitcoin is 17% away from matching its record price of $68,789 seen on the same day.
Zooming out to what's happened in the year to date so far, and the picture is even more staggering. Bitcoin's gains since January stand at an impressive 94% — but that pales in comparison to ETH, which has rallied by a whopping 542% over the past 11 months.
These triple-digit gains are made all the more remarkable by how the Ethereum blockchain has been crippled by high gas fees. Some critics argue that the astronomical rise in transaction costs have rendered the network unusable.
Ethereum has managed to shrug off these concerns by how it's the home of non-fungible tokens and decentralized finance.
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Why is ETH Surging?
As ever, it's difficult to pinpoint what's behind ETH's resilient performance — however, it's undeniable that a significant network upgrade over the summer will have had an impact.
Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 changed the way gas prices are estimated — and now, a chunk from every transaction fee is now burned forever, reducing the amount of ETH in circulation. With supply constricted at times of high demand, this could push up prices.
The latest figures from ethburned.info suggest that 1,074,034 ETH has been burned so far — worth $4.1 billion at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, the amount of ETH in circulation has been diminished further given how 8.4 million ETH — worth $39.7 billion — has been staked ahead of the long-awaited launch of Ethereum 2.0.
When the network makes the transition from a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Stake, validators will be responsible for verifying transactions and adding them to the blockchain. Validators have been required to stake 32 ETH for the right to operate a node — and while this entitles them to receive block rewards, they run the risk of seeing their stake slashed if they act against the network's best interests.
Questions remain over when Ethereum 2.0 will launch in full, but some crypto analysts argue that layer-two solutions — which sit on top of the blockchain — help address scalability concerns for now.
ETH's dominance — or in layman's terms, its share of the total cryptocurrency market — has surged from 10.9% at the start of the year to 21.3% at the time of writing.
Rival blockchains — dubbed "Ethereum killers" because of how they aim to offer greater levels of scalability, faster transactions and lower fees — have also been no match for ETH's surge this week. The prices of Solana, Cardano and Polkadot have all tumbled into the red over the past seven days.
