After a week of largely sideways trading, Ethereum prices finally broke out during Thursday’s Asian trading session.
According to charts by Tradingview citing prices on Coinbase, ETH prices hit an all-time high of $1,920 a few hours ago. Since then they have retreated slightly to trade at $1,895 at the time of press.
The move marks a gain of 8.5% on the day as both ETH and BTC notch up new highs. Bitcoin’s ATH came at the same time when it touched $52,675 according to Binance prices on Tradingview.
Ethereum’s gains have been greater than Bitcoin’s over the past 24 hours as it has not moved a great deal since it first topped $1,800 on Feb. 9.
Ethereum prices are now just 5.2% away from the psychological $2,000 level and it seems so long ago that it first broke the $1,000 barrier back in January 2018. Its all-time high of $1,425 came just a week after that and it did not stay there long.
2018 saw Ethereum prices collapse almost 95% to bottom out at around $80 in December of that year. It spent the next 18 months at lows between $100 and $270 with a brief spurt above that in June 2019.
Ethereum only really broke out of its long bear market in late July 2020 when it topped $400 for the first time in two years. The DeFi boom of that year drove demand for ETH even higher as did the highly anticipated launch of the ETH 2.0 Beacon Chain on December 1. Staking has finally been enabled by Coinbase which may have driven the recent momentum.
By the end of the year, ETH was trading at around $700. In the eight weeks since then, prices have surged a monumental 170% to today’s levels.
The two highs for the two top assets have driven total market capitalization to a new peak of $1.62 trillion according to Coingecko. It has over doubled since the beginning of the year and is now almost double the previous 2018 peak of $830 billion.
Other big movers on the day of new highs include Cardano cranking 12% to reach $0.94 as its ‘Mary’ upgrade nears, Binance Coin powering a monumental 32% on the day to hit $170, and Litecoin adding 12% itself to reach $235.
Stellar, Uniswap, Aave, Monero, and NEM have all made double-digit gains today.