Ethereum hits $2.6K all-time high as Bitcoin market dominance falls 50%
Largest altcoin by market capitalization, Ether (ETH) reached a new all-time high of $2,641 on April 22 despite a bearish phase sweeping through Bitcoin and other altcoins.
The market data shows ETH/USD hitting $2,600 on April 22 for the first time gaining daily price upto 9.2%. Ether was also on fire, hitting 0.047, its highest since August 2018 against Bitcoin.
The second-largest cryptocurrency increasingly stood out against the rest of the market, as Bitcoin continued to go lower and so did the altcoins.
Ethereum’s overall strength this month was already expressing itself in Bitcoin's dwindling market cap dominance, which dipped below 50% for the first time in almost three years.
"To be brutally honest, I stare at the chart of ETH/BTC and I see an enormous rounded bottom with potentially huge breakout just above," Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal said on Twitter in a series of posts.
"When you price anything up in Defi, NFT, community tokens, or even metaverse worlds, everything is basically priced in ETH, including designers time, etc. ETH is rapidly becoming the currency of the digital world and BTC is the pristine collateral and base layer."
Raoul marked Ether's superior gains compared to Bitcoin in recent times, part of a trend that has seen ETH/USD outperform by a considerable margin since the pit of the cross-asset price crash in March 2020.
Past is the proof that such events tend to spark the most intense part of "alt seasons" in which tokens go through a record-breaking surge before cooling off.
However, ether came with a predictable pay-off: Gas fees for sending transactions began to spike on the day, a timely reminder for those caught unaware during previous phases of the bull market.
