With a price surge of more than 13%, Ethereum remained the best-performing crypto asset among the top 10 in the last seven days. One of the major reasons behind the price recovery is the growing interest in ETH’s network upgrade (Ethereum 2.0).
According to Etherscan, a block explorer and analytics platform for Ethereum, the deposit contract of ETH 2.0 now has over 13.29 million tokens, which is the highest level on record. Amid the price surge, the total value of Ethereum staked under the deposit contract now stands at around $25 billion.
“With Ethereum's final Testnet merge on Thursday, prices briefly jumped above $1,900. Developers confirmed that the much-anticipated ETH upgrade will happen on September 15th or 16th. The social volume will dictate price volatility leading up to the event,” Santiment noted.
The ETH community showed support for the network upgrade of the world’s second-largest crypto asset from the very start. During the first week of the launch of Beacon Chain, Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract attracted more than 1 million ETH. The number topped 3 million in February 2021 and 13 million in July 2022.
Ethereum's Dominance
The overall dominance of ETH across the crypto market is surging. Ethereum now accounts for more than 20% of the market cap of cryptocurrencies, compared to nearly 14% in July 2022.
“For the first time in history, ETH Options Open Interest at $6.6B has surpassed BTC Open Interest at $4.8B. This appears to be a result of traders betting big with call options the Merge scheduled for mid-September,” Glassnode highlighted.
In the past 24 hours, whale ETH transactions have jumped sharply. The latest data posted by Whale Alert indicates that a large crypto address moved 20,000 Ethereum worth more than $38 million from Huobi to Binance on Friday 12 August at around 03:33 UTC.
