The price of Ethereum has rocketed past (AU) $4206 for the first time as momentum for the cryptocurrency grows.
Often seen as the “little brother” of the more famous bitcoin, the NFT craze has put Ethereum back on the map.
It is now worth more than Disney, PayPal and Nestle.
In recent months, US markets have seen an explosion in the trading of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.
An NFT is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain. And Ethereum is the cryptocurrency of choice for the purchases of many NFTs.
An NFT of the photo which sparked the iconic “Disaster Girl” meme sold for a mind-boggling $650,000 in April.
The price rise of Ethereum has been astronomical. At the start of 2017 it was selling for $13 and in 2020 just $193.
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In April the growth of Ethereum fast outpaced that of bitcoin.
Ether gained 40 per cent while bitcoin fell about 2.4 per cent, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The decentralised, open-source blockchain cyrptocurrency is second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, after bitcoin.
Proposed by programmer Vitalik Buterin in 2013, the network went live in 2015.
The cyrptocoin is increasingly gaining institutional support. The European Investment Bank last week issued $154 million worth of two-year bonds on the Ethereum network.
Jean-Marie Mognetti, chief executive of asset manager CoinShares, said the growth in markets like NFTs had been “mind-boggling”.
“Ethereum as a network is what makes this all possible.”