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The price of Ethereum set a new all-time high, exploding by as much as 21% in 24 hours to trade above $1,470 on Monday.
The price hit $1,473, topping its previous record of $1,439 set last week, before settling around $1,396 in early European trading.
The record high came on the seven-year anniversary of the day that Vitalik Buterin, a Russian-Canadian best known for being Ethereum’s main developer, announced the cryptocurrency’s launch on a bitcoin forum in 2014.
The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $160 billion, has risen on 90% a year-to-date basis, outpacing bitcoin’s 10% rise.
But Ethereum’s rally is expected to match the momentum in bitcoin’s. Analysts at Galaxy Trading expect the price to trade as high as $3,000 in the next few weeks. Comparing bitcoin and Ethereum’s rally, the analysts noted a similar pattern of limited price momentum followed by a major breakout.
Ether has also been seeing massive trading volumes on ZebPay, India’s oldest and most widely-used bitcoin and crypto asset exchange.
“Ether tends to follow bitcoin,” said Rahul Pagidipati, CEO of ZebPay. “Now that Bitcoin has hit record highs and is consolidating, investors are adding ether. Together they constitute about 80% of the total crypto market cap and are the biggest on ZebPay.”
Another popular cryptocurrency analyst, Lark Davis, expects Ethereum to double in the next two weeks just “like bitcoin did.”
Ethereum has gained 1,200% in value since the March 2020 coronavirus-induced market crash, compared with a 700% increase in the value of bitcoin. In 2020, the Ethereum network saw over $1 trillion worth of transactions on its blockchain – exceeding the transaction volumes of payment platforms such as PayPal.