Ethereum Reaches New Peak, Surpasses $4,000

In the past 24 hours, ETH, the digital coin of the Ethereum blockchain reached a record peak of $4,141.9, an increase of 7% from its previous price.

The new week saw Ether reach new heights on Monday, stunning investors as it surpassed $4,000. The coin reached a market value of $483.4 billion, the second-largest, after Bitcoin's domineering $1.09 trillion.

Unlike Bitcoin, which only serves as a decentralized store of value, Ethereum does much more. It can serve as a means of a decentralized internet, out of reach or maintenance of any central authority or regulatory body.

It's formed the basis for an increasingly popular trend in crypto known as "decentralized finance," which aims to recreate traditional financial products with blockchain technology, the distributed computer system that underpins many cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum is also benefiting heavily from the popularity of NFTs, which are digital assets designed to represent ownership of unique virtual items, with numerous NFTs, such as CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks, running on Ethereum.

Bitcoin, however, has been stagnant, for the first time in a long while. The premier cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $1.04 trillion, has been struggling to reclaim the $60,000 price it temporarily reached last week. On Monday, the price of the digital asset soared to a three-week high going to $60,000 only to crash down to about $56,632. It is currently trading at $55,819, a decline of 5.26% from its price in the past 24hours.

According to Glassnode, a blockchain data provider, this inactivity is likely as a result of a fraction of Bitcoin capital being channeled to Ethereum and Dogecoin by investors. These other coins have been in demand in the past weeks, lowering bitcoin's dominance in the digital currency market - the lowest in two years. 

The entire crypto market is worth about $2.5 trillion, and Bitcoin has $1.04 trillion of that. Ethereum has a market cap that's nearly half of bitcoin's, $458 billion. Other coins like Doge and Binance are gaining more popularity in the crypto market with market caps of $61.6 billion, and $100 billion respectively.

Binance coin has also performed well this year, steadily rising from $37.9 at the beginning of the year, to the $650 it currently is at.