The Ethereum price surged and crossed the $4,000 milestone. ETH is trading at $4,132 (as at the time of publishing), bringing its total market cap to more than $477 billion.
Ether, the second biggest cryptocurrency, has grown over 2,000 percent in the last year.
On May 10, 2020, one Ether token was worth $180. a year later, the crypto coin hits over $4,000 for the first time, a rise of over 2,100 percent. Though Dogecoin is sucking up most of the world’s cryptocurrency attention, it’s been a huge May for Ethereum already, as this new milestone comes just a week since the cryptocurrency coin hit $3,000 for the first time.
Ether is a cryptocurrency minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Bitcoin, the most known currency, is built on its own, separate blockchain. But while Bitcoin is more like gold, principally used as a speculative asset, Ether is used by cryptocurrency traders to buy and sell “altcoins”, such as Dogecoin. NFTs, tokens that authenticate ownership of a digital product, are notably bought and sold using Ether, not Bitcoin.
The Ethereum blockchain was founded in 2013 by Canadian-Russian programmer Vitalik Buterin when he was just 19 years old. Buterin has over 333,000 Ether tokens — it’s possible to see other traders’ portfolios if you have their wallet address — which at the current price values his holdings at over $1.36 billion.
The cryptocurrency has been growing rapidly over the past year, mostly over anticipation for its relaunch as Ether 2.0, but this latest rally is tied to the news last week that the European Investment Bank issued $120 million in bonds using Ethereum blockchain.
