By Natalie DeCoste
The world’s second largest cryptocurrency hit an all-time high on Thursday, challenging Bitcoin’s market dominance.
Ether, built on top of the open source Ethereum blockchain, is the world’s second-largest digital currency by market value. The currency hit a record high of $2,800 on Thursday morning, according to data from Coin Metrics.
Ether may have hit a new high, but that still pales in comparison to Bitcoin price of $54,471. The current price is still $10,000 below Bitcoin’s record high and the crypto has struggled to regain momentum due to improvements in liquidity and a higher turnover on the public Ethereum blockchain.
“Both BTC and ETH experienced a comparable liquidity shock earlier this month which triggered a comparable de-levering event of their respective derivatives markets in subsequent days. But ETH spot depth has recovered quicker and if anything liquidity conditions on some exchanges is better than prior to that event. Higher turnover on the ETH public blockchain means a noticeably higher fraction of those tokens can be considered highly liquid, further blunting the impacts of futures liquidations,” explained JP Morgan in a note to investors.
The rise in price for Ether is up 273% since the beginning of the year. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has only gone up 86% this year. Topping the rise in crypto prices is Dogecoin which has gone up 6,388% since the start of the year but still is trading for less than a dollar.
The surge in Ether’s price comes just as the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced that it plans to issue its first-ever digital bond sale on the Ethereum blockchain network. According to Bloomberg, the sale will be led by Goldman Sachs, Banco Santander, and Societe Generale.
“In another testimony of EIB’s leading position in capital markets’ innovation, this transaction marks the EIB’s first step as a pioneer in the use of blockchain technology for the issuance of financial securities. By helping to create a framework for a new market ecosystem, the EIB believes this will bring value added for both issuers and investors, while contributing to an innovative, efficient and secure market infrastructure,” said Bertrand de Mazières, Director General Finance at the EIB.
The EIB’s move to invest in Ether led to speculation that the currency is gaining traction among mainstream financial institutions.
With Ether’s boost and the rise of other “altcoins,” or alternative currencies, Bitcoin’s dominance of the crypto market fell below 50% last week for the first time since August 2018, according to CoinMarketCap.
The first time Bitcoin’s market share dipped below 50% was in 2017 during what is now called the “crypto winter” when a number of different cryptos experienced a dip in prices.
In other Ethereum related news, Nvidia is trying again to limit the use of its RTX 3060 graphics cards for mining Ethereum. Nvidia first implemented a limit to the mining back in February in an attempt to make the cards less palatable for miners who have infamously been buying up cards in what is already a supply-constrained market and that would ensure more cards made it to gamers.
The strategy only worked for a month before the company accidentally released a driver without the full anti-Ethereum code in place, making it possible for people to mine Ethereum at full speed in some cases.
