Crypto Q1 2021

A total of over $4.2 billion worth of crypto purchases have been made in less than 3 months. Bitcoin’s market cap is now above $1 trillion, and Ethereum’s is over $210 billion, with demand for both assets at an all time high. The cumulative crypto market cap has surpassed $1.8 trillion as prices continue to climb.

It feels like more than just the BTC price has been growing fast this year…

Bitcoin may well have reached the point where it could be considered legitimate by more people than not. Banks, funds, and fortune 500 companies are now keeping (and continually adding to) their own BTC balances as predominant enthusiasm for the digital asset continues to accelerate. Put simply, institutional sentiment surrounding Bitcoin has transformed dramatically, from one of negativity to one of opportunity.

Ethereum appears stronger by the day as well. Despite user’s frustration with high gas fees, the blockchain ecosystem is undeniably thriving. A multitude of new users are adopting crypto as a whole after realizing the immeasurable potential, value, and opportunity Ethereum and NFTs can provide.

Exchanges are reporting record purchases and outflows of ETH recently. ETH reserves on crypto exchanges hit a two year low last week. Perhaps some of the excitement can be attributed to the next stages of the highly anticipated ETH 2.0 upgrade, scheduled to occur within the next several months.

A number of current factors are likely playing into ETH’s dramatic Q1 Price rise…

The upcoming EIP-1559 upgrade aims to establish “the market rate” for block inclusion, and to burn the majority of the ETH in the transaction fee. This will actually provide a deflationary mechanism to Ether’s supply, which adds to the overall scarcity of ETH. Additionally, over 9 million ETH are now locked in DeFi instruments, and over 3.5 million ETH is staked in the ETH 2.0 contract. The absolute explosion of mainstream NFT interest has been a sight to see. $250 million in NFT volume has been transacted over the past month alone, with the four largest NFT projects driving $10 million in daily volume. Not to mention the attendance of world-famous tech tycoons, athletes, artists, musicians, and all around business moguls.

Every time you look up another amazing NFT deal has been made.

I might have been interested, if only the gas fees weren’t so steep! :) Great purchase DANNY!

Perhaps most exciting of all right now, Ethereum developers are working especially hard to complete a major upgrade, potentially within the next few weeks! Optimistic Rollups. This particular layer-2 solution is poised to scale the Ethereum blockchain and provide massive relief of gas fees incurred during simple ETH transactions as well as smart contract transactions...\

“Rollups are a powerful new layer-2 scaling paradigm, and are expected to be a cornerstone of Ethereum scaling in the short and medium-term future (and possibly long-term as well). They have seen a large amount of excitement from the Ethereum community because unlike previous attempts at layer-2 scaling, they can support general-purpose EVM code, allowing existing applications to easily migrate over. They do this by making a key compromise: not trying to go fully off-chain, but instead leaving a small amount of data per transaction on-chain.”- Vitalik Buterin

Short-term possibilities boggle the mind.
I couldn’t be more eager to see what Q2 brings.