ETH Roller-Coaster Week Frays Nerves as Fundamentals Strengthen

It’s been a wild week for the DeFi traders, with ETH experiencing a mini bear-bull cycle over the course of just a few days.

After reaching a then all-time high above $2,500 last week after Coinbase was listed, ETH took a dive over the weekend hitting lows just above $2,050. But this week, ETH has rallied back to a new all-time high of $2640. Ethereum’s cryptocurrency has retraced some of those gains and is now trading at $2,287.

Beyond this past week’s rollercoaster ride, Ether is up more than 10x in the past year pointing to a longer term rally. Gains point to increased use driven by the boom in DeFi and NFTs, and have outpaced the most well-known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

ETH Growth Compared to BTC

(ETH compared to BTC via CoinMarketCap)

While both ETH and BTC have hit new all-time highs in 2021, Ethereum has been growing at a faster rate, with ETH climbing 213% year-to-date, compared with BTC’s 68% increase.

The difference has driven the ETH/BTC ratio to climb to 0.048, the highest since 2018.

Bitcoin’s crypto market cap dominance has fallen to 50%, for the first time since 2018. Ethereum’s market cap dominance is at 14%.

Daily Transactions and Trading Volume

Regardless of daily price swings, less flashy metrics paint a promising picture of ETH’s growth. Wallet addresses, number of daily transactions, and ETH trading volume have all been steadily increasing.

On average, there have been around 1.5M daily ETH transactions over the past week, the highest ever. Average daily ETH transactions have remained above 1.2M for the majority of 2021.

ETH daily trading volume has also been relatively high, averaging above $40B during the past week, similar to averages hit during the January and February price rally.

Ethereum Wallets

There are 149M unique Ethereum addresses, with an average growth rate around 130k new wallets per day according to data on Etherscan.

To be sure, the rate of new wallets created on a daily basis has slightly decreased since January, which saw a daily growth rate around 151k new wallets per day. One user can have multiple unique wallet addresses, and bots can also create wallets as part of trading strategies.

That said, the steady climb in unique wallet addresses taken in context with ETH’s rapid price growth suggests that beyond simply making new wallets, many new users are actively participating in the space.