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The price of Ethereum has rallied by more than 6% over the last day, returning above the $3,600 mark last seen on September 7.
Trading at $3,622 at press time, ETH is up 6.2% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. This is, however, still 16.7% away from the asset’s all-time of $4,356 recorded on May 12 this year.
Ethereum is also the top gainer among the ten largest cryptocurrencies in the market, followed by Cardano and Binance Coin which are up 3.8% and 1%, respectively.
Bitcoin is up 1.8% over the day, currently trading at $48,134.
Ethereum co-founder joins world’s top innovators
While the market’s second-largest cryptocurrency has been steadily growing since Monday, the latest price action comes on the heels of Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin appearing in Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People List” of 2021 as one of the top innovators in the world.
Time’s annual list also features world leaders, activists, artists, and musicians, including the likes of pop star Billie Eilish, country legend Dolly Parton, tennis star Naomi Osaka, and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Citing Buterin’s impact on the Ethereum ecosystem, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, praised the 27-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer for being “a builder’s builder.”
“No one person could’ve possibly come up with all of the uses for Ethereum, but it did take one person’s idea to get it started,” wrote Ohanian. “From there, a new world has opened up, and given rise to new ways of leveraging blockchain technology.”
He added that “whether it’s startups like Sorare reinventing fantasy sports or Rainbow users showing off their NFT collections, none of this would’ve existed without Vitalik’s creation.”
NFT record volumes
Despite the recent boom in NFTs, Buterin admitted that for him this is probably the most surprising use case among Ethereum’s other use cases such as decentralized finance (DeFi), online games, or identity management.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique blockchain-based tokens that can certify authenticity and ownership of digital collectibles such as artworks, music, and even concert tickets.
OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace which exploded in popularity in recent weeks, has seen over $3.4 billion in transaction volumes last month and is on course to repeat that success in September.
According to data from Dune Analytics, the NFT platform has already processed roughly $1.7 billion in sales this month.
The market’s largest NFT collection Cryptopunks last month surpassed $1 billion in all-time sales and is now approaching the $1.3 billion milestones, per CryptoSlam.io.
Among other possible reasons for Ethereum’s latest spike is the growing number of ETH burned in the wake of last month’s London hard fork upgrade.
One of the upgrade’s most important features was the inclusion of EIP-1559, an Ethereum improvement proposal changing the way the network’s transaction fees work.
With the London upgrade rolled out, transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain are now removed from circulation, or burned, gradually reducing the network’s total supply.
As of today, more than 303,000 ETH worth almost $1.1 billion has been burned since the activation of the London upgrade on August 5.