Ethereum når $3,500 XNUMX bare dager før Dencun-oppgraderingen

Ethereum starter uken etter å ha gått forbi $3,500 3, som markerer en økning på XNUMX % siden denne tiden i går, ifølge CoinGecko-data.

At the time of writing, the Ethereum price is $3,506.38, which means that ETH has gained 15% in the past week. This is the highest Ethereum has been since January 2022, when it was coming down from the late 2021 bull run. And 91% of ETH held in wallets is now in the money. That means all but 9% of ETH has appreciated in value since it was purchased, according to blockchain analytics firm IntotheBlock.

Ethereum developers are now only 9 days away from pushing the Dencun upgrade to mainnet on March 13. It’s long been said that the upgrade, which will introduce proto-danksharding to the network, will make transactions much faster and cheaper. Last week a handful of devs told dekryptere the change will be striking, adding that this is the kind of upgrade they’ve been “dreaming of.”

It tends to be the case that when investors are bullish on Ethereum, DeFi projects see a lot more action. That’s very much been the case this time around. The total value of assets in DeFi protocols has reached $94 billion as of Monday morning—the highest it’s been since TerraUSD crashed in 2022, according to DeFi Llama.

In super simple terms. the TerraUSD crash and the contagion that followed scared a lot of money out of DeFi protocols. The total value locked in DeFi projects had been $132 billion just before the Terra collapse, according to DeFi Llama.

A quick refresher: The Terra ecosystem was able to grow so large so fast because it promised upwards of 20% returns on deposits. When it suddenly crashed in May 2022, it took lots of other projects and firms with it and made traders wary of protocols that promised sky-high returns.

Denne varsomheten sendte TVL så lite som 36 milliarder dollar i oktober 2023. Men når dette skrives, har eiendeler i DeFi-økosystemet nesten tredoblet seg i verdi. Ethereum har hatt en vekst på 64 % den siste måneden – noe som overgår veksten på 54 % i pris. Og Solana er ikke langt bak det, etter å ha sett 57 % vekst de siste 30 dagene etter at det opprinnelige SOL-tokenet har økt med 34 % i samme periode.