The total cryptocurrency market topped $3 trillion Monday, for the first time, according to data from CoinGecko. Market capitalization of the crypto market has gained more than 280% since the start of this year.
That rally for crypto has been at least partly fueled by a run-up in Ethereum, which climbed to a record high Monday, trading near $4,800. Meanwhile, bitcoin gained about 5.9% over the past 24 hours, recently peaking at $68,494 a new record high.
“This milestone has been fuelled by global interest, institutional customers, and the outstanding evolutions in blockchain technology,” Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer at Bitfinex wrote in emailed remarks.
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Analysts have attributed the surge of both bitcoin
BTCUSD,
and ether
ETHUSD,
to supply squeezes.
More than 860,000 ether has left centralized crypto exchanges since Oct. 1, according to data analytics firm IntoTheBlock. Meanwhile, over 8 million ether has been locked in decentralized finance, or DeFi, IntoTheBlock wrote in its Telegram channel.
Mikkel Mørch, executive director at crypto hedge fund ARK36 wrote in an email that “as Bitcoin exchange balance is at a 3 year low while long-term holder supply is at an all-time high, there are simply too few bitcoins available to keep up with the demand.”
For the past seven days, Binance Coin and Solana
SOLUSD,
the world’s third and fourth largest cryptocurrency, rose 21.6% and 19.9%, respectively. XRP
XRPUSD,
rose 13.6% over the past seven days. Shiba Inu, a popular meme asset modeled after dogecoin
DOGEUSD,
dropped 23.6% over the past seven days. Avalanche, Terra and Chainlink
LINKUSD,
rose 46%, 17% and 10% for the past seven days, respectively.