Ethereum Retakes $4,000 for the First Time Since 2021

By Jason Nelson

The price of Ethereum broke $4,000 today as the crypto bull market continues just as Bitcoin again set a new all-time high and broke above $70,000 on Friday, according to Coinbase.

ETH has been trading above $3,900 since early in the morning on Friday before it reached $4,000 exactly—for a 4.20% increase in the past 24 hours—on Coinbase and then receded to $3,943.

But this latest surge began at the start of February, when the price of ETH began climbing steeply from around $2,300, reaching $3,000 three weeks later.

While Ethereum returning to $4,000 is a significant milestone—a price it hasn’t seen since December 2021—the cryptocurrency is still 20% lower than its all-time high of $4,891 hit on November 15, 2021.

Another crucial milestone occurred in September 2022, when ETH completed its long-awaited ‘Merge,’ transitioning the network from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake algorithm. It traded at around $1,300 in the weeks that followed.

The number one proof-of-stake blockchain began its race to $4,000 on March 1 as the network prepared for the Dencun upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain on March 13. Once completed, the upgrade will add new technical features and lower the cost of transacting on Ethereum scaling networks.

Unfortunately, Ethereum’s climb was not without hurdles. After reaching $3,500 on Monday, the crypto market went into freefall by Tuesday, with ETH falling from $3,816 to $3,398 before bouncing back up to $3,778. By this time, the amount of ETH staked on the network had grown 9% to around $116 billion.

Ethereum currently holds a market capitalization of $471 billion.

In January, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved several Bitcoin ETFs, leading to hopes that a spot Ethereum ETF would soon be approved. In January, Standard Chartered predicted that spot Ethereum ETFs would push the price of ETH to $4,000—although it eventually got there on its own.

However, the market will still have to wait and see its actual impact, as the SEC delayed its decision on BlackRock’s Ethereum ETF on Monday. Grayscale, VanEck, and Franklin Templeton, which submitted a proposal to the SEC last month, are joining BlackRock in filing applications for spot Ethereum ETFs.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

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