Earlier today, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) smashes past $1750 levels hitting a new all-time high. In just a week’s time, ETH has gained more than 25% driving a strong rally in the altcoin market amid Bitcoin consolidation. The new price-top for ETH comes just three days before the launch of CME Ether Futures as ETH now enters a price discovery mode.
However, apart from the ETH investors, Ethereum miners have been minting massive money recently. The Ethereum gas feed has skyrocketed to an average transaction fee of over $25, as per charts on BitInfo. With less than a $5 transaction fee on January 1, 2020, the avg. transaction fee has soared 5x in just the last 35 days. Just as the transaction fee topped new highs, data on Glassnode shows the miners minted a whopping $3.5 million in just a span of an hour.
#Ethereum miners earned $3.5M (!) in a single hour – the highest hourly revenue to date.
Chart ?? https://t.co/MYE72aEpgU pic.twitter.com/HHdWnMaEtK
— glassnode (@glassnode) February 5, 2021
Ethereum has really been the miners’ paradise as ETH miners have been minting nearly 2x than Bitcoin miners so far in 2021. As CoinGape reported, a whopping $325 million has been paid in ETH transaction fee in January 2021 alone. This comes amid a massive surge in the Ethereum network activity, a large part of which has been contributed by the DeFi market.
The DeFi crypto market has skyrocketed tremendously this year. As per data on Messari, the overall DeFi market cap has surged over 300% year-to-date.
Improving Fundamentals, ETH 2.0 Staking & Institutional Buying
A large part of the ETH price rally comes backed by a number of factors like improving on-chain fundamentals, the ETH 2.0 staking and the recent uptick in ETH institutional buying. The total number of non-zero addresses for ETH has reached an all-time high as per Glassnode.
?? #Ethereum $ETH Number of Non-Zero Addresses just reached an ATH of 53,500,867
View metric:https://t.co/beS1MtIgAZ pic.twitter.com/k5H4EmdsPe
— glassnode alerts (@glassnodealerts) February 6, 2021
Also, the total number of ETH coins staked with the Ethereum 2.0 has reached an all-time high of 2,947,682 ETH. It means that a whopping $5 billion worth of ETH has been staked which shows investors’ confidence in future Ethereum developments.
The #Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract now holds more than $5 billion USD worth of $ETH (~3M ETH).
Chart ?? https://t.co/MYE72aEpgU pic.twitter.com/Z6cBIwkkis
— glassnode (@glassnode) February 5, 2021
Digital asset manager Grayscale has been on an ETH buying spree over the last week. On Friday, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) added another 21,000 ETH coins taking its weekly purchasing to over 100K ETH coins for a net investment of $200 million. With this, the total assets under management of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) have moved past $5 billion.
BREAKING: After adding 21,112 $ETH over the past 24 hours, Grayscale now have over $5 billion Ether in assets. In just 7 days since re-opening the ETHE Trust, Grayscale added 104,990 $ETH, worth $180 million pic.twitter.com/BcjfeAMD3B
— Bloqport (@Bloqport) February 5, 2021
