The cryptocurrency market is on fire. Ether (ETH) has reached a new all-time high of $3,338. This altcoin season may be just beginning as Bitcoin's price struggles to break past the $56000 -$58000 range.
After dropping to a low of $2,160 on April 25th, the price for Ether has rallied 54% and reached an all-time high at 3.324 as Monday's 12% spike lifted this top altcoin above the major milestone of $3,300 for only the first time in history!
The crypto-rich rejoiced as the price of Ethereum skyrocketed, pushing Vitalik Buterin into a new category of wealth as the newest member of the Billionaire Boys Club. Yet if Ether manages to stay above $3,100 by April 7, then all of the 76,000 bearish options contracts that are ‘out of the money’ will become worthless.
The altcoin market has been on a tear in the past two weeks though, with Ether and other coins seeing their values increase substantially. This is not just good news for crypto traders but also investors who have seen them surge 119% over the last couple of months.
https://insights.glassnode.com/the-week-on-chain-week-18-2021/
One interesting thing to note is according to a Glassnode analysis, [an on-chain analytics firm] a huge contributor to the multi-month rally could be the amount of Ether being held long term since the latter half of 2020. Hodling coins collected during the early bull market is progressively becoming a more popular technique.
These findings from Glassnode prove that institutional investors are beginning to take notice of the Ethereum ecosystem and with 10 instances of withdrawals in excess of 200k Ether per day happening in just 4 months as demand grows.
The chart above shows the steady decline of Ether on exchanges from September 2020 to August 2021. This coincides with a noticeable increase in Ethereum being stored in decentralized finance smart contracts which could lead to more investor protection as well as better transparency and security.
The economy is changing and we are witnessing a new trend. As it becomes more common to lock Ether in smart contracts, centralized exchanges may begin struggling with liquidity as they struggle against increasing competition from decentralized platforms.
Although Bitcoin continues to struggle, altcoins are makingtheir case for an emerging altseason.
The wild trading of Waves and Ethereum Classic was the talk of today's markets. Prices for both tokens nearly doubled in value as traders continued to make their way back into cryptocurrency following a turbulent start to 2018.
Maker, a decentralized finance protocol with the largest total locked value of 10.92 trillion dollars, is now ranked number one on CoinMarketCap's charts after rallying 17% to $5777 in 24 hours’ time.
The surging cryptocurrency market cap has reached $2.29 trillion and Bitcoin's dominance rate is now 46.6%.
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/range-bound-bitcoin-price-opens-the-door-for-altcoins-to-move-higher
