Ethereum Price at 22-Month High as Open Interest Soars and Dencun Nears

Ethereum (ETH) continues to be the top coin. The second biggest digital asset by market cap is trading at 22-month highs on Monday.

ETH is now priced at $$3,151, CoinGecko shows, having broke past the $3,000 mark for the first time since April 2022 last week. It has gained 3.5% since the same time yesterday and risen by more than 8% over the past week.

Kaiko analyst Dessislava Aubert told Decrypt that "open interest just hit a multi-year high of $7.7 billion and funding rates are at their highest levels since early January," meaning new capital is entering the market due to rising speculative interest as well as hedging.

ETH's network is set to undergo an important upgrade next month. Named "Dencun," it aims to solve scalability problems with the blockchain.

The upgrade will bring "proto-danksharding" to the network, promising to make it faster and cheaper to use via layer 2 solutions. Layer 2s, or L2s, batch together unverified transactions made on Ethereum, process them on an external network, and send confirmation back to mainnet.

A number of high-profile, traditional Wall Street firms are also hoping to get a spot ETH exchange-traded product approved.

Such a fund, if given the green light by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), would bring the asset to traditional investors. Big names like BlackRock, VanEck, and Grayscale are all waiting on the regulator. Just last week publicly traded crypto exchange Coinbase submitted a comment letter to back Grayscale's bid for an Ethereum ETF.

The SEC in January approved 10 spot Bitcoin ETFs, which have so far been popular and received huge inflows of capital.

British multinational bank Standard Chartered said last month that a spot ETH ETF will get approved by May and send the asset's price above $4,000 per coin.

Despite its recent surge, ETH is still well below its November 2021 all-time high of $4,878.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.