Ethereum prices reached their highest ever levels during Monday morning’s Asian trading session, coming just shy of $1,500. Bigger price predictions have been made by some of the industry’s top players.
A few hours ago, several exchanges including Binance reported their highest ETH prices at around $1,475 but the asset has retreated a little since then, trading at $1,435 at the time of writing marking a 24 hours gain of 8%.
Over the past seven days, ETH has gained 15.5% whereas Bitcoin has retreated 7% since the same time last week. At the moment at least, Ethereum has finally decoupled from its big brother and is actually gaining on it in Satoshi terms.
At current prices, there is now over $4 billion in staked ETH, locked up for at least another year in the Beacon Chain deposit contract. The ETH 2.0 Launchpad reports this as 2.82 million ETH which is almost 2.5% of the entire supply.
This does not sound much but it should be noted that this ETH is now locked up for over a year to secure the new blockchain. It will only be accessible again when Phase 1.5 merges ETH 1 and ETH 2 together.
Currently, earnings are roughly 9.3% APY, which for those that have staked is an impressive return combined with the premise that the asset has surged by 140% since Beacon Chain was launched less than two months ago.
Staking is just one aspect of the demand for Ethereum. DeFi and stablecoin usage are a couple more, and there is also the fact that there are way more developers working with Ethereum than any of its rivals.
Institutional investors have also noticed this and that demand is likely to increase in 2021 which leads us on to price predictions.
Industry expert Mike Novogratz tweeted a lunch meet up with Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, adding that prices could go to $2,600.
As usual, however, the prediction sparked off the tired old tirade of crypto tribalism from maximalists of some form or other.
With the current momentum in Ethereum’s favor, there is little doubt the asset will post higher prices this year, how high remains to be seen.