During the first half of 2021, the ETH volume surged by more than 1,400% totaling $1.4 trillion, while BTC’s increased by 489%, reaching a total of $2.1 trillion.
Coinbase took data from 20 trading venues and released a report, where it informed that Ether’s trading volume spiked by 1,461% during the first six months of 2021. Its total climbed to $1.4 trillion compared to $92 billion in the first half of 2020. In the meantime, Bitcoin marked an increase of 489%, and its trading volume hit $2.1 trillion.
The Coinbase report noted:
“Many of our largest institutional clients, including hedge funds, endowments, and corporates, increased or added first-time exposure to ETH in H1, believing the asset has long-term staying power tantamount to BTC’s while playing a differentiated role in their portfolios.”
The research also revealed the total market capitalization numbers for the first half of 2021. At the beginning of the year, the market started at $769 billion and surged to $2.4 trillion in May. Subsequently, it declined to $1.4 trillion by the end of the period.
The largest chunk of Bitcoin’s profits came during the first months of 2021 until April, when its price escalated towards an ATH. On the contrary, Ether saw the most of its earnings in May 2021, when it was worth more than $4,000.
The debate whether Ether can surpass Bitcoin and become the leading digital asset has been a hot topic in the last few years.
At the beginning of May, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks – Mark Cuban – joined the argument and gave his three reasons why ETH will eventually outperform BTC: Ethereum’s network is capable of processing more transactions per second, and it is the platform where “the future of finance” is built. It also boasts a higher utilization compared to Bitcoin.
The prominent investor Mike Novogratz also gave his two cents on the matter. The renowned crypto bull hinted that such a scenario where Ether surpasses Bitcoin is possible as the network behind the second-largest cryptocurrency is rapidly expanding. However, he outlined the characteristics of the two digital assets expecting BTC to be the digital version of gold while ETH will have different purposes:
“I think Ethereum may even become the biggest cryptocurrency one day but it will have a very different use case than BTC.”