Bitcoin and Ether Reach New All-Time Highs

[ad_1]

Bitcoin and Ether hit new all-time highs Monday night.

The price of Bitcoin at one point surpassed $ 67,700 – eclipsing a previous record set in late October – while Ether, the native blockchain token of Ethereum, topped $ 4,800 for the first time.

These record moves come amid a larger rally in the crypto market. So-called “ethereum killers” Solana and Cardano are up 23% and 9% respectively in the past seven days.

The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which launched in October and tracks bitcoin futures contracts indexed to the future price of the cryptocurrency, rose more than 8% on Monday.

While it is difficult to tie short-term price movements to a specific event – and cryptocurrency price charts are often plagued with volatility – some analysts believe bitcoin and ether will continue to rise. increase in the coming weeks.

In a note sent on Monday, Mikkel Morch, executive director of crypto hedge fund ARK36, said that a price of $ 70,000 for bitcoin “now appears to be imminent.”

Others have bolder projections on where bitcoin is going, as JPMorgan recently doubled down on its prediction that bitcoin would eventually hit $ 146,000, with a shorter-term price target of $ 73,000 for this year.

Learn more about cryptocurrencies from CNBC Pro

Next week, Bitcoin is rolling out its biggest upgrade in four years.

The software upgrade is known as Taproot. This will mean greater confidentiality and transaction efficiency – and most importantly, it will unlock the potential of smart contracts, a key feature of its blockchain technology.

Meanwhile, ether has been on the rise since the implementation of Altair, a grid upgrade that went live in late October.

Altair was widely viewed as a non-event by almost everyone except validators, that is, people in the Ethereum network who verify transactions. But the upgrade was a crucial step in implementing Ethereum 2.0 or Eth2, which has been in the works for years and will fundamentally overhaul the entire network.

Ethereum 2.0 would shift the network from the power-hungry “proof of work” mining system, where miners solve difficult mathematical equations to create new coins, to a “proof of stake”, which simply requires users to take advantage of their ether cache as a way to verify transactions and create new tokens.

Eth2 aims to make Ethereum more scalable, secure and sustainable. This change will be huge not only for Ethereum, but for the entire cryptocurrency community.

[ad_2]